El Salvador President Nayib Bukele met with President Donald Trump on Monday, where he declared he will not “smuggle a terrorist into the United States.”
When asked if he would return a deported MS-13 member currently involved in a legal battle, Bukele said, “How can I smuggle, how can I return him to the United States? I smuggle him into the United States? What do I do? Of course, I’m not going to do it.”
“The question is preposterous,” he stated. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”
When asked if he could release the gang member inside El Salvador, Bukele responded, “Yeah, but I’m not releasing—I mean, we’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country.”
“We just turned the murder capital of the world to the safest country of the Western Hemisphere and you want us to go back to releasing the criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world? That’s not going to happen,” he explained.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio added during the meeting that the individual in discussion is a “citizen of El Salvador.”
“He was illegally in the United States and was returned to his country. That’s where you deport people, back to their country of origin, except for Venezuela that was refusing to take people back or places like that.”
Earlier this month, Judge Paula Xinis denied the Trump administration’s request to lift her order requiring the return of the MS-13 gang member.
“Defendants have claimed—without any evidence—that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13 and then housed him among the chief rival gang, Barrio 18,” Xinis wrote. “Not to mention that Barrio 18 is the very gang whose years’ long persecution of Abrego Garcia resulted in his withholding from removal to El Salvador. To be sure, Abrego Garcia will suffer irreparably were he not accorded his requested relief.”
The Supreme Court has also ordered that the United States must facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, writing that the government must facilitate the migrant’s “release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”
