April 15, 2025
Trump Administration And El Salvador’s President Agree: Mistakenly Deported Man Won’t Return To U.S.
Garcia entered the country illegally around 2011, but in 2019, an immigration judge ruled he couldn’t be deported to El Salvador after reviewing evidence
The Trump administration and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele have decided that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported to the Central American country, will not be returning to America, CBS News reports.
The decision was made during Bukele’s visit to the White House on April 14 just days after the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said it was willing to take “all available steps to remove any domestic obstacles” to facilitate his return. When a reporter asked the El Salvadorian president about a plan regarding Garcia, he referred to him as a “terrorist” and claimed he had no power to do so.
“How can I return him to the United States? I smuggle him into the United States, or what do I do? Of course, I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous,” Bukele said. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”
That’s when Attorney General Pam Bondi interjected. “That’s not up to us,” she said. “The Supreme Court ruled, President, that if El Salvador wants to return him …we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.”
In early April 2025, the Supreme Court failed to provide a qualifier of whether the foreign country wanted to send Garcia back and ruled that a lower court order required the government to “facilitate” his release from El Salvador’s custody. The high court then ruled Trump’s team must facilitate the Maryland resident’s release.
According to CNN, Garcia entered the country illegally around 2011; however, in 2019, an immigration judge ruled he couldn’t be deported to El Salvador after reviewing evidence. He found that a gang was “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.” After being accused of being a member of the MS-13 gang, Garcia’s lawyer insists the client has no affiliation.
The Trump administration called Garcia’s deportation to the high-security prison known as CECOT a “administrative error.”
“It is my understanding, based on official reporting from our Embassy in San Salvador, that Abrego Garcia is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador,” senior State Department official Michael G. Kozak said. “He is alive and secure in that facility. He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.”
The visit between Trump and Bukele marks a new era of foreign partnerships for the new White House administration after alienating some of the U.S.’s main allies in the early days of the transition for the Biden-Harris administration. Popular amongst his country’s residents, Bukele has named himself “the world’s coolest dictator” and the “philosopher king” while working to suspend some civil liberties in order to go after some of the country’s violent gangs.
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