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News Analysis
Experts say President Nayib Bukele has the power but not the interest to return a man deported from Maryland to El Salvador in error.
Annie Correal has been covering El Salvador’s role in the Trump administration’s deportation plans.
April 16, 2025, 7:15 a.m. ET
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.
