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Briefing|El Salvador Won’t Return Wrongly Deported Man
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/briefing/el-salvador-deportations-harvard-university-trump.html
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In an Oval Office meeting today with President Trump, El Salvador’s leader said that he would not return a man who was wrongly deported from the U.S. and sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
“Of course I’m not going to do it,” the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, said. He compared returning the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to smuggling “a terrorist into the United States.” Trump smiled in approval.
Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three, came to the U.S. illegally in 2011, and gained protected legal status in 2019. Until last month, he lived in Maryland with his wife and children, who are all U.S. citizens, and he has never been charged with a crime. Trump administration officials acknowledged that his deportation was an “administrative error.”
While the Supreme Court last week ordered the government to “facilitate” his return, Trump’s aides have insisted that the courts lack the authority to make such calls. Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator from Maryland, said he would travel to El Salvador this week if Abrego Garcia was not returned.
For more: In arguments against returning Abrego Garcia, some of Trump’s top aides misstated several facts.
