On Monday, when President Donald Trump met with with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele at The White House, the two authoritarian leaders sent a clear signal that Trump administration is solidifying plans to use the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador as an offshore gulag, one where the U.S. judicial branch has no jurisdiction over who is detained, including legal residents and citizens. A Maryland District Court and the U.S. Supreme Court have ordered the administration to “facilitate” and “effectuate” the return of Maryland’s Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was illegally deported to the Salvadoran prison, in what the administration calls an “oversight” and an “administrative error.” In their joint press conference, Trump and Bukele scoffed at the rule of law in their refusal to afford due process to Abrego Garcia, signaling yet another crisis point in the legal saga that has unfolded in Maryland and El Salvador over the last month.
On March 12, Abrego Garcia was pulled over after picking up his special needs son at the end of his shift as a union metalworkers apprentice and detained. “At approximately 9:00 PM the night he was arrested, Kilmar called me from Baltimore,” his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura recalled in a court filing. “Kilmar did not understand what was happening or why. He was reassured he would see a judge.”
But, like hundreds of others recently detained by ICE and deported without due process, he did not see a judge. On the morning of March 15, Abrego Garcia called his wife one more time. “That call was short and Kilmar’s tone was different. He was scared. He was told he was being deported to El Salvador…to a super-max prison called ‘CECOT,’” Vasquez Sura wrote. “After that, I never heard from Kilmar again.”
On April 4, Paula Xinis, a federal judge in Maryland, ruled that the Trump administration must return Abrego Garcia to the United States by the end of the day Monday, April 7, noting that allegations of gang affiliation need to come in “the form of an indictment, complaint, criminal processing … I haven’t yet heard any of that from the government.”
The ruling notes that, though Abrego Garcia is in El Salvador, “this court retains subject area jurisdiction” to order his return in order to “preserve the status quo and preserve Abrego Garcia’s access to due process in accordance with the Constitution and governing immigration statutes.”
The Trump administration’s response was chilling. “Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is presently being held in El Salvador, by the El Salvadoran Government. The United States does not have control over Abrego Garcia. Or the sovereign nation of El Salvador. Nevertheless, the court’s injunction commands that Defendants accomplish, somehow, Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States in give or take one business day,” the government wrote in its formal court response to the ruling. “Such a request—one made to a foreign ally, on a hyper-sensitive subject, involving a designated terrorist—is freighted with foreign policy considerations.”
Chief Justice John Roberts had previously issued an “administrative stay,” halting Xinis’s order demanding that the U.S. government “facilitate and effectuate the return of [Abrego Garcia] to the United States by no later than 11:59 PM on Monday, April 7.” But last Thursday, April 10, the Supreme Court removed this stay, and unanimously ordered the government to detail its efforts to return Abrego Garcia, but also giving the administration a wedge when declaring that the district court must also show “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
The government argued that “facilitate” should be interpreted as removing “any domestic obstacles,” but not to “make demands of the Salvadoran government” or “dispatch personnel onto the soil of an independent, sovereign nation” because “a federal court cannot compel the Executive Branch to engage in any mandated act of diplomacy or incursion upon the sovereignty of another nation.”
This argument creates an impossible position for Abrego Garcia, who was born in San Salvador, El Salvador in 1995. The Barrio 18 gang first extorted the family for selling pupusas out of the house and then began to try to recruit Abrego Garcia, threatening him if he didn’t join the gang, even after the family moved multiple times. This history led to the “withholding order” that kept him from being deported to El Salvador, where, judges ruled, he would face irreparable harm from the gangs. Bukele used the same gangs and related violence as a pretense to suspend constitutional rights so that the country could make mass arrests without due process. So now Abrego Garcia is being held in prison with the very gangs he fled.
Trump and Bukele, both master manipulators of media, played up their logical bind for the cameras. When a reporter asked Bukele if he would return Abrego Garcia, who the Trump administration accuses without any evidence of belonging to the MS-13 gang, Bukele called the question “preposterous.”
“Of course I’m not going to do it,” he said. “I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States…How can I return him to the United States. I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it….I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”
Trump grinned at this bit of sophistry. His administration has been claiming that it does not have the power to follow a court order and bring a Maryland resident home, while Bukele says that he somehow does not have the power to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. either and that to do so would, somehow, be the equivalent of “smuggling.” Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and long-time advocate of draconian border policies, claimed in the same press conference that Xinis in Maryland had asked the administration to “kidnap” Abrego Garcia from CECOT.
The bad faith arguments are almost laughable. But the consequences are dire. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted the inherent danger in this situation in a concurring opinion. “The government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without any consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
“The government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without any consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Trump himself made the same point, in an exchange that Bukele posted on social media. “The homegrowns are next,” Trump says in the video. “You’ve got to build about five more places, alright? It’s not big enough.” In keeping with the sadistic mood of the press conference, the room erupts with laughter.
Trump has made the suggestion before. “I have suggested that you know why should it stop just at people that cross the border illegally? We have some horrible criminals, American-grown and born,” he said last week when asked about the deportations to El Salvador. “If we could get El Salvador or somebody to take them I’d be very happy with it, but I have to see what the law says.”
Of course, both the Supreme Court and a Maryland District court have ruled that the deportation of Abrego Garcia is illegal and the administration has refused to comply with “what the law says.” As if flaunting their refusal to acknowledge court orders they don’t like, Miller now claims that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was not an “error” at all. “No one was mistakenly sent anywhere. The only mistake that was made is a lawyer put an incorrect line in a legal filing,” he said. “Because he is a member of a foreign terrorist organization, withholding orders do not apply.”
There has been no evidence presented since 2019, when Abrego Garcia was granted the holding order, that he had any gang affiliation. At the time, the alleged affiliation was dependent on the evidence that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and sweatshirt, which agents claim would indicate he was a member of an MS-13 set that operated in Long Island, New York — a place Abrego Garcia had never been. But the legal bind created by Salvadoran, rather than domestic, incarceration bypasses the need for due process.
“If they can just sweep someone off the street, put them on an airplane, and send them to a torturer’s prison in an authoritarian state like El Salvador without due process and then not bring him back claiming they have no control over El Salvador,” Maryland Congressional Representative Jamie Raskin said in an interview on Legal AF. “Then they could do it to anybody.”
Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen wrote to the Salvadoran Ambassador to the United States, Milena Mayorga, to request a meeting with Bukele. “Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia never should have been abducted and illegally deported, and the courts have made clear: the Administration must bring him home, now. However, since the Trump Administration appears to be ignoring these court mandates, we need to take additional action. That’s why I’ve requested to meet with President Bukele during his trip to the United States, and – if Kilmar is not home by midweek – I plan to travel to El Salvador this week to check on his condition and discuss his release,” Van Hollen said in a statement.
There was a prayer vigil held outside of The White House during Trump and Bukele’s meeting to pray for Abrego Garcia’s return and a protest at the federal building in Baltimore, where ICE has been holding detainees in substandard conditions.
Chanting “Bring back Kilmar!” and “No ICE, no KKK, no fascist USA,” about 100 protestors marched through downtown Baltimore, demanding Abrego Garcia’s return. The demonstration, organized by grassroots groups including Free State Coalition, Baltimore Rapid Response Network, and local Indivisible chapters, drew a cross-section of concerned residents, union members, and immigrant rights activists. They carried signs that read: “No Justice, No Peace,” “Defend Due Process,” and “Kilmar Cannot Be Disappeared.”
“Kilmar is a family man — a hardworking person and union member who was trying to achieve the so-called American dream,” said Joseph Raysor, Jr., a member of Teamsters Local Union 355. “I just had to let my voice be heard today so that he knows, and his family knows, there are people in his corner fighting for his return.”
“I just had to let my voice be heard today so that he knows, and his family knows, there are people in his corner fighting for his return.”
Joseph Raysor, Jr., a member of Teamsters Local Union 355
Speakers at the demonstration emphasized that the protest was just the beginning. Organizers announced plans for sustained weekly demonstrations — what they are calling “Occupy ICE”— held every Monday at the federal building. Larger mobilizations are also planned for the coming weeks, including May 1, International Workers’ Day.
“This is a moment that should shudder us to the core,” said Sergio España, an organizer with the Baltimore Rapid Response Network. “If the Supreme Court allows this to stand — if we allow this to happen — then there is no rule of law left in this country. It doesn’t matter if you’re brown. It doesn’t matter if you’re Black. It doesn’t matter if you’re an immigrant.”
Senators Angela Alsobrooks and Van Hollen had previously toured the Baltimore site and sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE arguing that “it is clear that the directives from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE Headquarters in service of President Trump’s mass deportation agenda are resulting in unacceptable harms inflicted on those being detained.”
The conditions are so bad in part because of the number of people being detained there, and yet ICE continues to arrest people with no criminal history, as in the case of Elsy Noemi Berrios, who was pulled from a car in Westminster, Maryland, after an ICE agent with no warrant broke its window.
“This President’s goal is to overwhelm us with chaos and cruelty in hopes that we fail to notice that he lacks the ability to fulfill his most basic promise – to bring down the cost of living,” Alsobrooks said in a statement. “To have a President who not only disregards but so clearly abhors the rule of law will forever change this country. For the worse.”
The press conference between the two presidents seemed to show Trump wanting to make America more like El Salvador. Bukele, who calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator,” serves not only as a client of Trump’s, but also as a model of authoritarian rule. In 2022, Bukele declared a “state of exception” — a legal category championed by Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, allowing a sovereign to suspend the rule of law in a time of crisis — to deal with gang violence. Though the constitution of El Salvador limits such a state to 60 days, the state of exception is still in place and El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. And yet, when Bukele ran for re-election — also against the constitution, which does not allow for consecutive terms — he won with 80% of the vote.
In the oval office, Bukele told a story about an alleged Venezuelan gang member who told the authorities in El Salvador that he had been arrested six times in the United States, once for shooting a cop in the leg, and had been released every time. “There’s something broken,” Bukele concluded, of the American justice system.
It was an astounding moment, little commented on, for the Salvadoran president to call the U.S. criminal justice system broken for incarcerating too few people — and the U.S. president agreeing with him. The U.S. is fifth, globally, in terms of incarceration per capita, but, according to the U.S. Prison Policy Initiative, if U.S. states were treated as countries, Louisiana and Mississippi would follow close behind El Salvador as the second and third most incarcerating places on earth.
It was an astounding moment, little commented on, for the Salvadoran president to call the U.S. criminal justice system broken for incarcerating too few people — and the U.S. president agreeing with him.
When it was pointed out that Trump said, just a week ago, that he would abide by a Supreme Court ruling, he said, “I don’t even have to answer this question from you. Why don’t you just say ‘Isn’t it wonderful that you’re keeping criminals out of the country.’ Why can’t you just say that?”
But this isn’t just an example of authoritarianism or a constitutional crisis. It is the life of a Maryland man and his family. He has been in the Salvadoran prison for nearly a month now and no one in his family has heard from him. His wife is only sure that’s where he was taken because she was able to pick him out in one of the photographs of inmates in CECOT.
“It was a group of men bent over on the ground, with their heads down and their arms on their heads,” Vasquez Sura wrote in a legal filing. “None of their faces were visible. There was one man who had two scars on his head like Kilmar does, and tattoos that looked similar to Kilmar’s. I zoomed into get a closer look at the tattoos. My heart sank. It was Kilmar.”
Jaisal Noor contributed reporting.