The president of El Salvador has refused to return a Maryland man who the White House admitted was mistakenly sent to a notorious megaprison in his country.
“The question is preposterous,” President Nayib Bukele said Monday when asked if he intended to free and give back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”
Bukele appeared alongside President Donald Trump after the two met at the White House.
“We’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. We just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere. You want us to go back to releasing criminals so they can go back?” Bukele added.
Trump then unleashed a tirade on CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins, saying, “Why don’t you just say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country?’ Why can’t you say that? Why do you go over and over, and that’s why nobody watches you anymore, you know, you have no credibility.”
Abrego Garcia has been detained in the infamous CECOT prison for over a month after he and hundreds of other Venezeuelan migrants were rounded up by Trump administration officials.
Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, was arrested in Baltimore on March 12 shortly after leaving his job as a sheet metal worker to pick up his 5-year-old son. Previously, the government alleged
However, in a court filing, lawyers for U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement said he had been mistakenly deported because of an “administrative error.”
Last week, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to arrange his return.
“The record reflects that Abrego Garcia was apprehended in Maryland without legal basis … and without further process or legal justification was removed to El Salvador,” she wrote in her order.
In response, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt mocked Xinis’s ruling.
“We are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador,” she said in a statement.
In its decision on Thursday, the Supreme Court instructed Xinis to clarify her order, but otherwise upheld it and said the Trump administration must “facilitate” Garcia’s return to the U.S.
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