At a White House meeting with President Trump, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said yesterday 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,” Bukele said when reporters asked if he was willing to help return the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. The deportation case is at the heart of a legal battle that has gone to the Supreme Court. Here’s what else to know.
Bukele said that returning Abrego Garcia would be like smuggling “a terrorist into the United States.” As the Salvadoran president spoke in the Oval Office, Trump smiled in approval.
Background: The Trump administration has said that the deportation was an “administrative error,” and has been ordered by the Supreme Court to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. But Trump has defied the order.
Quotable: “This meeting is one of the starkest examples of a foreign leader fawning over and placating Trump during a visit to the Oval Office,” said Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House reporter for The Times.
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