El Salvador's Bukele rules out returning migrant, in love-fest with Trump

By AFP/Danny KEMP

El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele on Monday ruled out returning a man wrongly deported from the United States, as he bonded with Donald Trump over a scheme to send migrants to a mega-prison in the Central American country.

The US president gave a warm welcome in the Oval Office to 43-year-old Bukele -- the self-proclaimed "world's coolest dictator" who is now Trump's key ally in his controversial deportation push.

Bukele and top White House officials alike rejected calls to repatriate Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in spite of a US Supreme Court order for the Trump administration to facilitate his return from the notorious jail.

"Of course, I'm not going to do it," Bukele told reporters.

"The question is preposterous.... I don't have the power to return him to the United States."

The expulsion of Abrego Garcia has set off a major legal crisis, after the Trump administration admitted he had been deported in an "administrative error," even though a court order blocked it because of fears of gang persecution.

Trump officials insist he is a member of El Salvador's notorious MS-13 gang, despite him never having been convicted.

The 78-year-old Republican, who has made mass deportations a core part of his second-term agenda, thanked Bukele for "helping us out" and called him a "hell of a president."

'Homegrown criminals'

Trump also urged Bukele to build more jails, saying he was even considering deporting some US citizens who commit violent crimes to El Salvador.

"We also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat," he said. "I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country."

Trump and Bukele, who wore a dark T-shirt under a suit, spent much of the meeting complimenting each other on their migration and crime policies.

Known for his stylish dress sense and social media savvy, Bukele is broadly popular at home for clamping down on once rampant drug gangs that terrorized El Salvador.

But the Salvadoran leader is accused of overseeing mass human rights violations, epitomized by the huge, brutal prison known as CECOT.

In 2021, his government was accused by the administration of then-president Joe Biden of striking deals with gang leaders.

Trump and Bukele also share a taste for conservative, strongman-style politics. They spent several minutes criticizing the media and then talking about the issue of transgender athletes in women's sports.

Frog-marched

Shortly after Trump's inauguration for a second term, Bukele made the extraordinary offer to take in prisoners from the United States, in exchange for a fee of $6 million.

Trump took the Salvadoran leader up on his proposal, sending more than 250 migrants there -- a majority of them under a rarely used wartime law dating to 1798, which stripped the deportees of due process.

Slickly produced footage of their arrival -- including chained and tattooed men having their heads shaved and being frog-marched by masked guards -- was widely promoted by both the Salvadoran and US governments.

The Trump administration contends that the migrants are members of criminal gangs designated by the United States as terrorist organizations, including El Salvador's MS-13 and Venezuela's Tren de Aragua.

However, relatives of several of the men contend they have no connection to organized crime and in some cases had been swept up simply because they had tattoos unrelated to any gang activity.

Despite the partnership, El Salvador was among the dozens of US trade partners that the Trump administration slapped with 10 percent tariffs earlier this month.

The United States is the main destination for Salvadoran exports. Of the nearly $6.5 billion in goods exported from El Salvador in 2024, $2.1 billion went to the United States, including clothing, sugar and coffee, according to the central bank.

But Trump and Bukele also share a fondness for cryptocurrency, with El Salvador becoming the world's first country to establish bitcoin as legal tender in 2021.