Family’s Plea Ignored as Bukele Refuses to Release Man Mistakenly Deported to Notorious Prison

The president of El Salvador gave a brutal response when asked if he planned to return a father who was mistakenly deported from the US to a mega jail which has been dubbed the ‘world’s worst prison’.

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from Maryland, was sent to the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) in El Salvador last month, in the wake of Donald Trump’s mass deportations.

While Garcia did enter the country illegally sometime around 2011, a judge had previously decided in 2019 that he should not be deported because he was being threatened by a gang in his native country.

When it emerged that Garcia had been deported, a Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s administration must ‘facilitate’ Garcia’s return – but during a meeting between Trump and El Salvador president Nayib Bukele, the leaders made clear that it would be up to Bukele’s country to return Garcia.

During the meeting at the Oval Office, CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins asked Bukele if he planned to allow Garcia to return to the US.

However, Bukele refused to even entertain the idea of Garcia’s return.

He said: “I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.

“We just turned the murder capital of the world to the safest country the western hemisphere. And you want us to go back into the releasing criminals, so we can go back to the the murder capital of the world, and that’s that’s not going to happen.”

Bukele’s comments come after Trump said last week he would honor the Supreme Court’s decision to return Garcia, saying at the time: “If the Supreme Court said bring somebody back, I would do that. I respect the Supreme Court.”

Trump himself did not comment on Garcia’s return during the meeting with Bukele, but Attorney General Pam Bondi indicated it was not a decision that could be made by the US.

“That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us,” Bondi said. “The Supreme Court ruled that if El Salvador wants to return him … we would facilitate it: meaning, provide a plane.”

A court filing relating to the deportation of Garcia previously shed some light on how he ended up in the prison, explaining it was simply down to ‘administrative error’.

The filing, made public on March 31, said: “On March 15, although Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error.”

In an attempt to explain how the mistake could have occurred, acting ICE field office director, Robert Cerna, said that Garcia was ‘not on the initial manifest of the Title 8 flight to be removed to El Salvador’, but rather he was an ‘alternate’.

He further added that the ‘manifest did not indicate that Abrego-Garcia should not be removed’, calling it an ‘oversight’.