Siding with the Trump administration, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said on Monday that he would not send back a Salvadoran migrant, whom the U.S. authorities deported from Maryland in error last month, an expulsion that set off a legal battle that has reached the Supreme Court.
“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power,” Mr. Bukele said, sitting in the Oval Office beside a beaming President Trump.
Latin America experts scoffed at the idea that Mr. Bukele, whose government has ordered mass arrests and seized control of the country’s courts, would suggest he could not return one man — if he wanted to.
“I have no words,” said Ana María Méndez Dardón, the Central America director at the Washington Office for Latin America, a human rights group. “If he has any remaining commitment to democratic norms, he has an obligation to resolve this case.”
A federal judge in Maryland ordered the return of the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to the United States, a decision that the Supreme Court unanimously upheld last week.
In refusing to return Mr. Abrego Garcia, Mr. Bukele is falling in line with the Trump administration and its deportation plans, helping to cement a strategy for dealing with legal challenges. The administration is arguing that deportees to El Salvador belong to terrorist gangs — and that after it turns the men over to a sovereign foreign nation, it has no right to interfere.
In the process, the administration is relying on Mr. Bukele’s cooperation — and on how powerful he has become in his country since he took office in 2019.
“President Bukele has, over the course of his administration, captured control over state institutions and eliminated any checks on power,” said Noah Bullock, the executive director of the Salvadoran human rights group Cristosal.
Crucially, according to Mr. Bullock and others, Mr. Bukele has an extraordinary degree of control over who is imprisoned because of a state of emergency he imposed — and has repeatedly extended — that suspends normal due process rights.
Under the state of emergency, which was put in place after a number of killings in 2022, an estimated 85,000 Salvadorans have been swept up in mass arrests, according to human rights groups.
Mr. Bukele’s hard-line measures, which are credited with dismantling violent gangs and drastically bringing down crime in El Salvador, have earned him soaring approval ratings in his country and admirers around Latin America and beyond.
They have also given him a “mechanism to detain arbitrarily,” said Mr. Bullock, and “normalized things like almost indefinite pretrial detention.”
Under the state of emergency, writs of habeas corpus — legal orders meant to ensure people are not unlawfully detained — are routinely ignored. Of the 7,200 habeas claims presented to the Constitutional Court in El Salvador, less than 1 percent have been resolved, according to Mr. Bullock’s group.
“And that’s, unfortunately, the judicial black hole where Kilmar is now finding himself,” Mr. Bullock said.
Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three, had entered the U.S. illegally but was granted legal permission by a judge to stay in the United States, and was never charged with or convicted of being in a gang, which he denied.
On Tuesday, the federal judge in his case in Maryland chided the government for having done nothing to secure his release. The same day, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, said that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation had in fact been purposeful and legal.
According to U.S. officials, Mr. Abrego Garcia is being housed with nearly 290 other detainees that the Trump administration is known to have sent to Mr. Bukele’s so-called megaprison, the Terrorism Confinement Center, outside San Salvador, the capital.
While the majority are Venezuelans accused of being affiliated with the Tren de Aragua gang, several dozen are Salvadorans.
Most of the deportees have been found to have no serious criminal history and were detained in recent months on flimsy evidence, such as tattoos and clothing that the administration claims are proof of gang ties.
The U.S. administration expelled some of the men under the Alien Enemies Act, which gives the president the right to deport individuals who present a security risk in times of war. But many were deported under regular U.S. immigration law — including Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Writs of habeas corpus have been presented to El Salvador’s Supreme Court on behalf of the deportees, to no avail. Many of the men have American lawyers, who say they have received no information on their clients from the American or the Salvadoran authorities — even whether they are alive.
In El Salvador, the legal pathways to securing Mr. Abrego Garcia’s freedom “have been exhausted,” said Ms. Méndez, of the Washington Office for Latin America.
Virtually the only remaining avenue for securing Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release in El Salvador, she said, was “diplomatic pressure.”
In exchange for holding detainees sent by the United States, Mr. Bukele has said he is being paid $6 million by the U.S. government.
The Trump administration’s recent deportation operation has put a spotlight on the Salvadoran leader. If anything, experts say, the attention and the administration’s support have emboldened him.
When Mr. Bukele was asked by a reporter Monday at the White House if he would consider releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia, he replied, “Yeah, but I’m not going to release him.”
He went on: “I mean, we’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. We just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country of the Western Hemisphere, and you want us to go back to releasing criminals?”
Julie Turkewitz and Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.