El Salvador President Nayib Bukele told President Donald Trump and an audience at the White House Monday he has no intention of returning deported Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
Bukele said, "How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don't have the power to return him to the United States."
Garcia was deported in what someone in the Justice Department purported was a mistake based on court rulings about the man's presence in the U.S. The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the administration must "facilitate" his return.
Based on Bukele's comments, such facilitation appears remote. "How can I return him to the United States? If I smuggle him into the United States, what do I do? Of course, I'm not going to do it," he said.
Trump Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller clarified the situation, saying, "This individual 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."
Miller asserted the courts have no standing in the matter. "The foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the president of the United States, not by a court," he said, adding that "no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States."
As for the DOJ assessment that Garcia's deportation was an "administrative error," Miller said, "Nobody was mistakenly deported anywhere. That's a big fact that all of you [in the press], most of you, have gotten wrong. No one was mistakenly sent anywhere. The only mistake that was made is a lawyer [Erez Reuveni] put an incorrect line in a legal filing that's since been relieved."