El Salvador President Bukele says he won't be releasing a Maryland man back to the US

"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."

The refusal of both countries to allow the return of Abrego Garcia, who had an immigration court order preventing his deportation over fears of gang persecution, is intensifying the battle over the Maryland resident's future. It has also 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.

The fight over Abrego Garcia also underscores how critical El Salvador has been as a linchpin of the U.S. administration's mass deportation operation.

How Bukele is helping with Trump'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.

"I want to just say hello to the people of El Salvador and say they have one hell of a president," Trump said as he greeted Bukele, who was wearing a black mock turtleneck sans tie.

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. Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is pushing for a meeting with Bukele while he is in Washington to discuss Abrego Garcia's potential return, and 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 expand his deportation plans

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.

The high court weighs in, and the administration response

The Supreme Court has called for the Trump administration to "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 on 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, although the man's attorneys say the government has provided no evidence that he was affiliated with MS-13 or any other gang. 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.

How Bukele is viewed back home

While Bukele's crackdown on gangs has popular support, the country has lived under a state of emergency that suspends some basic rights for three years. He built the massive prison, located just outside San Salvador in the town of Tecoluca, to hold those accused of gang affiliation under his crackdown.

Part of his offer to receive the Venezuelans there was that the U.S. also send back some Salvadoran gang leaders. In February, his ambassador to the U.S., Milena Mayorga, said on a radio program that having gang leaders face justice in El Salvador was "an issue of honor."

Populists who have successfully crafted their images through media, Bukele and Trump are of different generations but display similar tendencies in how they relate to the press, political opposition and justice systems in their respective countries.

The Trump-Bukele relationship

Bukele came to power in the middle of Trump's first term and had a straightforward relationship with the U.S. leader. Trump was most concerned with immigration and, under Bukele, the number of Salvadorans heading for the U.S. border declined.

Bukele's relationship with the U.S. grew more complicated at the start of the Biden administration, which was openly critical of some of his antidemocratic actions. Trump has also shown some irritation with Bukele in the past, accusing El Salvador of lowering its crime rate by sending people to the U.S.

"He's just, 'we're working with our people that are causing problems and crime,'" Trump said of Bukele at a campaign rally last year. "He's not working with them. He's dumping them in the United States and their crime rate, their murder rate, is down 72%."

Just before Bukele's arrival in Washington, the State Department updated its travel advisory for El Salvador to Level 1, which is for countries that are considered the safest to visit for U.S. citizens. The advisory notes that gang activity, and the accompanying murders and other violent crimes, has declined in the past three years.