WASHINGTON >> President Donald Trump’s top advisers and Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, said Monday that they have no basis for the small Central American nation to return a Maryland man who was wrongly deported there last month. Bukele called the idea “preposterous” even though the U.S. Supreme Court has called on the administration to “facilitate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return.Trump administration officials emphasized that Abrego Garcia, who was sent to a notorious gang prison in El Salvador, was a citizen of that country and that the U.S. has no say in his future. And Bukele, who has been a vital partner for the Trump administration in its deportation efforts, said “of course” he would not release him back to U.S. soil.

“The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Bukele, seated alongside Trump, told reporters in the Oval Office Monday. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”

Should El Salvador want to return Abrego Garcia, the U.S. would “facilitate it, meaning provide a plane,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said.

But “first and foremost, he was illegally in our country, and he had been illegally in our country,” she said. “That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us.”

In a court filing Monday evening, Joseph Mazzara, the acting general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, said it “does not have authority to forcibly extract” Abrego Garcia from El Salvador because he is “in the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation.”

Mazarra also argued that Abergo Garcia is “no longer eligible for withholding of removal” because the U.S. designated MS-13 as a foreign terror organization. Abergo Garcia’s attorneys say the government has provided no evidence that he was affiliated with MS-13 or any other gang.

In 2011, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers say, he fled threats and violence in El Salvador and came to the United States illegally to join his brother, a U.S. citizen, in Maryland. He later married an American citizen. In 2019, an immigration judge prohibited the United States from deporting him to El Salvador, saying he might face violence or torture there.

The refusal of both countries to allow the return of Abrego Garcia has played out in contentious court filings, with repeated refusals from the government to tell a judge what it plans to do, if anything, to repatriate him.

The judge handling the case, Paula Xinis, is now considering whether to grant a request from the man’s legal team to compel the government to explain why it should not be held in contempt.

Although the administration resisted helping Abrego Garcia, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said Monday that he wanted to discuss with Bukele returning the Salvadoran migrant. He added that he would travel to El Salvador this week if Abrego Garcia was not returned.

Michael G. Kozak, the senior bureau official in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, said in a sworn statement Saturday that, based on information from the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador, Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” in the prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.

Bukele aids U.S. immigration crackdown

Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the U.S. more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants — whom Trump administration officials have accused of gang activity and violent crimes — and placed them inside the country’s maximum-security gang prison just outside of the capital, San Salvador. That prison is part of Bukele’s broader effort to crack down on the country’s powerful street gangs, which has put 84,000 people behind bars and made Bukele extremely popular at home.

Bukele struck a deal under which the U.S. will pay about $6 million for El Salvador to imprison the Venezuelan immigrants for a year.

But Democrats have raised alarm about the treatment of Abrego Garcia and other migrants who may be wrongfully detained in El Salvador. New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged the administration to release Abrego Garcia and others “with no credible criminal record” who were deported to the maximum-security prison.

“Disregarding the rule of law, ignoring unanimous rulings by the Supreme Court and subjecting individuals to detention and deportation without due process makes us less safe as a country,” Shaheen said.

Though other judges had ruled against the Trump administration, this month the Supreme Court cleared the way for Trump to use the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th century wartime law, to deport the immigrants. The justices did insist that the immigrants get a court hearing before being removed from the U.S. Over the weekend, 10 more people who the administration claims are members of the MS-13 and Tren de Aragua gangs arrived in El Salvador, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday.

Trump wants to deport Americans

The president has said openly that he would also favor El Salvador taking custody of American citizens who have committed violent crimes, a view he repeated Monday.

“We have bad ones too, and I’m all for it because we can do things with the president for less money and have great security,” Trump said during the meeting. “And we have a huge prison population.” It is unclear how lawful U.S. citizens could be deported elsewhere in the world.

Before the press entered the Oval Office, Trump said in a video posted on social media by Bukele that he wanted to send “homegrowns” to be incarcerated in El Salvador, and added that “you’ve got to build five more places,” suggesting Bukele doesn’t have enough prison capacity for all of the U.S. citizens that Trump would like to send there.

High court weighs in

The Supreme Court has ruled that the Trump administration “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia.

Trump indicated over the weekend that he would return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. if the high court’s justices said to bring him back, saying “I have great respect for the Supreme Court.” But the tone from top administration officials was sharply different Monday.

“He’s a citizen of El Salvador,” said Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff. “So it’s very arrogant, even for American media, to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens.”

Bondi asserted that two immigration court judges — who are under Justice Department purview — found that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13. The allegation is based on a confidential informant’s claim in 2019 that Abrego Garcia was a member of a chapter in New York, where he has never lived.

This report includes information from the New York Times.