'Full-Blown Constitutional Crisis' Deepens as Bukele Refuses to Release Maryland Resident

"Everyone here is pretending," said immigration policy expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick as a video of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele speaking in the Oval Office circulated on Monday.

Bukele, said the senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, was pretending "that he's incapable of releasing" Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident whom the Trump administration expelled to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in March, while President Donald Trump continued to pretend he's unable to demand Abrego Garcia's release.

When reporters asked Bukele to weigh in on Abrego Garcia's case, the Salvadoran leader scoffed.

"Of course you're not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States," he said. "How can I return him to the United States, do I smuggle him into the United States? ...I don't have the power to return him to the United States."

Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant in 2011. He was accused by a police informant of being a member of MS-13 in 2019, but he denied the allegations and was never charged with a crime. He was denied asylum in a hearing, but a judge determined that he should not be deported to his home country of El Salvador, where he had a credible fear of facing persecution and torture.

He had been working as a sheet metal worker and living in Maryland with his wife and children for several years when he was among hundreds of people accused of being criminals and rounded up to be expelled to El Salvador under a Trump administration deal with Bukele last month.

In the Oval Office on Monday, Bukele joined the Trump administration in claiming nothing can be done to return Abrego Garcia to his family in Maryland.

"The U.S. is pretending it doesn't have the power," said civil rights lawyer Patrick Jaicomo. "And Bukele is pretending he doesn't have the power. So who has the power?"

The Supreme Court last week said the administration is responsible for "facilitating" Abrego Garcia's release, and the Department of Justice claimed in a filing on Sunday that under that order, it is only liable for allowing the man to enter the U.S. once he is freed from the prison in El Salvador.

Trump's treatment of the case represents "a full-blown constitutional crisis and possibly the watershed moment for what the near future looks like," said one writer. "If this holds, there is no law but Trump's law."

In the Oval Office, said J.P. Hill, both leaders were "openly saying they'll defy the Supreme Court and maybe even send American citizens to the prison camp in El Salvador. Nobody will be safe if we let this happen."

As Bukele and Trump both denied responsibility for the hundreds of people they have sent to CECOT, Documented reported on Merwil Gutiérrez, a 19-year-old Venezuelan immigrant who was also sent to El Salvador.

Gutiérrez has no criminal record in the U.S. or his home country, and was not a target of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's deportation operation. An ICE agent said, "He's not the one," when a group of officers came to make an arrest at Gutiérrez's apartment building, but another replied, "Take him anyway."

Gutiérrez's story, said Reichlin-Melnick, "comes as Bukele today pretends that he has no power to release people held in his own prison."