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Judge Boasberg Demands to Know If Trump Can Really Bring Abrego Garcia Home With a Phone Call
The judge questioned administration attorneys in a hearing on whether the White House has "constructive custody" of nearly 140 Venezuelan men it sent to El Salvador.
May 08, 2025
At a hearing Wednesday on the status of nearly 140 Venezuelan immigrants whom the Trump administration hastily expelled to El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, a federal judge told lawyers representing the detainees that there were "a lot of facts in their favor" regarding whether the White House has the authority to return the men to the United States.
During the hearing, Judge James Boasberg, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., questioned U.S. Department of Justice lawyers to determine whether the U.S. has "constructive custody" of Kilmar Abrego Garcia—a Maryland man whom the administration has insisted it can't bring back to the country even though he was mistakenly sent to El Salvador—and other prisoners at the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
If the White House does have constructive custody of the men, with El Salvador detaining them at the behest of the U.S. government, it would be possible to bring them back to the U.S. to receive due process—which DOJ lawyer Abishek Kambli reluctantly conceded they had not received before their expulsion.
Boasberg zeroed in on a comment President Donald Trump made in an ABC News interview last week about Abrego Garcia, when he told reporter Terry Moran that he "could" make a phone call to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to secure the Maryland father's return.
"You could pick it up and with all the power of the presidency, you could call up the president of El Salvador and say, 'Send him back,'" said Moran.
"And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that," Trump said.
On Wednesday Boasberg demanded to know if Trump's comments were accurate.
"Is the president not telling the truth, or could he secure the release of Mr. Abrego Garcia?" he asked.
"A country in which Trump can do whatever he wants to these people, say whatever he wants about what he did, but be protected from what he said in a case about what he did, is not the democratic country we have known or that we deserve."
Kambli replied that Trump was just speaking of "the influence that he has" but doubled down on the claim that the president's position of power doesn't equal legal control of constructive custody.
The White House has claimed it has no jurisdiction over the migrants even though they were sent to El Salvador under a $6 million deal Trump struck with Bukele.
Boasberg pointed to comments by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a visit to CECOT in which she suggested the U.S. is in control of who is sent to and remains at the prison.
"What about Secretary Noem saying CECOT is 'one of the tools in our tool kit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people,'" Boasberg asked Kambli, quoting Noem directly. "Is she wrong about that?"
Kambli attempted to deflect the suggestion that the U.S. is paying El Salvador directly to house migrants, saying that despite Noem's remarks, the administration has only paid "grants" to Bukele's government "for law enforcement and anti-crime purposes."
Boasberg also asked point-blank: "Is the United States paying the government of El Salvador to detain the migrants?"
Kambli did not reply directly, saying only that "there is no agreement or arrangement whereby the United States maintains any agency or control over these prisoners."
At another point the judge forced Kambli to admit that—contrary to repeated claims by Trump—the U.S. Supreme Court did not rule in his favor regarding his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, which the White House has used to expel people it accuses of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
The Supreme Court lifted a block imposed by Boasberg in an earlier ruling on the Alien Enemies Act, but did not uphold Trump's invocation of the rarely-used law.
"I know your client believes the Supreme Court upheld the invocation of the AEA," Boasberg told Kambli. "You agree the Supreme Court never did that, correct?"
Law & Crimereported that "almost audible squirming ensued" as Kambli gave "several evasive answers" before Boasberg read the Supreme Court ruling verbatim.
"They did not analyze that precise issue," Kambli finally admitted.
Former congressman Conor Lamb suggested Boasberg's harsh questioning of the Trump administration is what is needed in the judicial system as the president continues his mass deportation operation and threatens due process rights.
"A country in which Trump can do whatever he wants to these people, say whatever he wants about what he did, but be protected from what he said in a case about what he did, is not the democratic country we have known or that we deserve," said Lamb. "Judges, we need you now."
Law & Crime reported that Boasberg "signaled an obvious inclination toward finding the U.S. does have constructive custody over the relevant Venezuelan nationals detained in CECOT" before ordering the Trump administration to provide sworn declarations regarding who has official custody.
The judge ordered the organizations representing the plaintiffs, the ACLU and Democracy Forward, to decide by Monday whether to request new documents and depositions from the government in the ongoing case.
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Trump Ally Bukele Reportedly Set to Arrest Journalists Who Revealed His Secret Pact With Gangs
One critic said the Salvadoran president "wants to silence" the acclaimed digital news site El Faro "because they're shattering the myths of the Bukele administration."
May 05, 2025
An internationally acclaimed digital news outlet in El Salvador said Monday that the administration of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is preparing to arrest a number of its journalists following the publication of an interview with two former gang leaders who shed new light on a power-sharing agreement with the U.S.-backed leader and self-described "world's coolest dictator."
"A reliable source in El Salvador told El Faro that the Bukele-controlled Attorney General's Office is preparing at least seven arrest warrants for members of El Faro," the outlet reported. "The source reached out following the publication of an interview with two former leaders of the 18th Street Revolucionarios on Bukele's yearslong relationship to gangs."
"If carried out, the warrants are the first time in decades that prosecutors seek to press charges against individual journalists for their journalistic labors," El Faro added.
Bukele responded to the interview in a Friday evening post on the social media site X that read in part, "It's clear that a country at peace, without deaths, without extortion, without bloodshed, without corpses every day, without mothers mourning their children, is not profitable for human rights NGOs, nor for the globalist media, nor for the elites, nor for [George] Soros."
While the pact between Bukele and gang leaders is well-known in El Salvador, El Faro—which has long been a thorn in the president's side—was the first media outlet to air video of gangsters acknowledging the agreement.
As El Faro reported:
At the heart of the threat of arrests is irony: El Faro was only able to interview the two Revolucionarios because they escaped El Salvador with the complicity of Bukele.
One, who goes by "Liro Man," recounts that he was taken to Guatemala, through a blind spot in the Salvadoran border, by Bukele gang negotiator Carlos Marroquín; the other, Carlos Cartagena, or "Charli," was arrested on a warrant in April 2022, early in the state of exception, but quickly released after the police received a call at the station and backed off.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Salvadorans were being rounded up without due process, on charges of belonging to gangs.
The video interview explains the dichotomy: For years, Salvadoran gang leaders cut covert deals with the entourage of Nayib Bukele. In their interview with El Faro, the two Revolucionarios say the FMLN party, to which the now-president belonged a decade ago, paid a quarter of a million dollars to the gangs during the 2014 campaign in exchange for vote coercion in gang-controlled communities, on behalf of Bukele for San Salvador mayor and Salvador Sánchez Cerén as president.
"This support, the sources say, was key to Bukele's ascent to power," El Faro noted. "'You're going to tell your mom and your wife's family that they have to vote for Nayib. If you don't do it, we'll kill them,' Liro Man says the gang members told their communities in that election. Of Bukele, he added, 'he knew he had to get to the gangs in order to get to where he is.'"
Part of the deal was a tacit "no body, no crime" policy under which gang leaders agreed to hide their victims' corpses as Bukele boasted of a historic reduction in homicides in a country once known as the world's murder capital.
"We've wanted to talk about this for a long time, for the simple reason that the government beats their chests and says, 'We're anti-gang, we don't want this scourge,'" Liro Man told El Faro. "But they forgot that they made a deal with us, and you were the first to get this out."
In an ironic twist, the Trump administration deported gang members from the U.S. to El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center prison who faced federal indictments that could have resulted in their testifying in court about the pact with Bukele.
Responding to the possible arrest warrants for El Faro staffers, Argentinian journalist Eliezer Budasoff said on social media Sunday that "it's clear" that El Salvador's leader "wants to silence" the outlet "because they're shattering the myths of the Bukele administration, simply with more journalism."
The Bukele administration's attacks on El Faro include falsely accusing the outlet of money laundering and tax evasion, banning its reporters from press briefings, and surveilling its staffers with Pegasus spyware. El Faro has remained steadfast in the face of these and other actions.
"Every citizen must decide for themselves whether they want to be informed, or whether they prefer the blind loyalty this administration has demanded of its supporters since its first day in power," the outlet's editors wrote in 2022. "We don't have that choice. Our job is to report. We can't change the news, and we never will."
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Rwanda Confirms Talks With Trump Administration to Take Deported Migrants
"As we did with the U.K.-Rwanda deportation deal... let us unapologetically and loudly oppose this again," said one Rwandan human rights defender.
May 05, 2025
Rwanda's foreign minister confirmed Sunday that the East African nation's government is in "early stage" talks with the Trump administration about possibly taking in migrants deported from the United States.
"It has not yet reached a stage where we can say exactly how things will proceed, but the talks are ongoing," Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe toldRwanda TV. He added that the Rwandan government is in the "spirit" of offering "another chance to migrants who have problems across the world."
Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration is seeking nations that are willing to accept its deportees.
"We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries."
"We are working with other countries to say, 'We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries. Will you do that as a favor to us?'" Rubio said. "And the farther away from America, the better, so they can't come back across the border."
The Wall Street Journalreported last month that Trump administration officials have also asked other countries including Benin, Eswatini, Kosovo, Libya, Moldova, and Mongolia about resettling U.S. deportees.
In 2022, Rwanda agreed to take in some people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom while their claims were being processed. However, the scheme was shelved amid legal and human rights concerns following the return to power of the center-left Labour Party. Rwanda is still seeking to collect £50 million ($66.4 million) from Britain despite the canceled deal.
The United Nations refugee agency condemned the U.K.-Rwanda deal, asserting that "externalizing asylum obligations poses serious risks for the safety of refugees" and "is not compatible with international refugee law."
Local human rights defenders strongly oppose any resettlement of third-country migrants in Rwanda.
"I with other concerned and responsible Rwandans are going to wage a legal war to challenge this arrangement between [Trump's] government and the dictatorial regime of [Rwandan President Paul Kagame]," investigative journalist Samuel Baker Byansi said on social media Sunday.
"Rwanda is not a dumping site of migrants with criminal records who have served their sentence in the U.S.," he added. "As we did with the U.K.-Rwanda deportation deal, fellow Rwandans in the country and abroad, let us unapologetically and loudly oppose this again."
Last month, the U.S. deported Omar Abdulsattar Ameen, an Iraqi refugee who had lived in the United States since 2014, to Rwanda after officials in Baghdad accused him of being a former Islamic State militant who murdered an Iraqi police officer. This, despite a U.S. judge's order blocking his deportation on the grounds that the murder allegation was "not plausible" since Ameen was living in Turkey at the time of the officer's killing.
Critics have sounded the alarm over potential perils migrants might face in Rwanda, including human rights violations and the possibility that they could be sent to third countries where they are at risk of violence and persecution.
The Trump administration is facing legal challenges to its mass deportation efforts, which include sending immigrants to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay and the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison in El Salvador. President Donald Trump has even proposed deporting U.S. citizens to CECOT.
Trump appeared on NBC News' "Meet the Press" Sunday and was pressed by moderator Kristen Welker about the legality of his mass deportation program. Asked whether every person in the United States is entitled to due process, Trump replied: "I don't know. I'm not a lawyer."
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