President Donald Trump and his administration are acting like they don’t need to listen to the Supreme Court — even going so far as to publicly pretend the high court told them they have no obligation to send back a man they illegally shipped to El Salvador’s infamous torture prison.
Trump suggested last week he would comply with the high court’s unanimous decision ordering him to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man who Trump officials previously claimed was deported to El Salvador as the result of an “administrative error.” Abrego Garcia, who fled gang violence in El Salvador and came to the U.S. in 2011, had previously been granted a “protection from removal” order specifically barring his deportation to that country. He has never been charged criminally.
“If the Supreme Court said bring somebody back, I would do that,” Trump said. “I respect the Supreme Court.”
Trump and his administration, however, have changed their tune and are deliberately not complying with the court orders for several grim reasons, according to three people familiar with the situation.
There are plenty of officials in Trump’s White House and government who don’t want to give the news media what they’d deem a “win” or a “scalp,” the sources say. On a practical and legal level, Trump aides and lieutenants worry that complying too readily or quickly with court orders — or maybe even at all — would open the floodgates to other challenges and due process claims by other migrants whom the Trump administration shipped to prison in El Salvador, a person close to Trump and an administration official tell Rolling Stone. They would much rather set the precedent that if they rendition a person to a foreign gulag, that person is staying there, no matter what.
Some Trump administration officials are simply concerned about optics and want to make it look like its policy of shipping migrants to prison in El Salvador is as ironclad as possible — in part to act as a potential deterrent to undocumented people in the U.S. and migrants who’d want to come here, per the three sources.
Reasons aside, the administration is ultimately making a shockingly authoritarian argument with few parallels in American history: that it can send anyone, from U.S. soil, to a foreign prison, and no court can ensure the person’s return. Indeed, Trump mused again on Monday about sending American citizens — “homegrown” criminals, as he put it — to El Salvador.
“They’re just saying, ‘Hey, look, if we get someone out of the United States, there’s nothing you can do to make us get that person back,’” says Patrick Jaicomo, a civil rights litigator at the center-right Institute for Justice.
Jaicomo notes that the hundreds of migrants that Trump sent to El Salvador were not deported. “They’re being renditioned,” he says. “They’re actually being sent to one of the most notoriously dangerous prisons on the planet, without due process, without any sort of sentence, with apparently indefinite terms.”
Last week, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court unanimously sided with a lower court which had ordered the Trump administration to ”facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. “The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” read the unsigned, 9-0 opinion.
Over the weekend, the Trump administration told a lower court Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, the infamous mega-prison known as CECOT. The administration separately told the court that the judge would have no right to demand that officials secure Abrego Garcia’s release in El Salvador and bring him back to the U.S. Instead, the administration argued that the Supreme Court hadn’t actually ordered them to have Abrego Garcia released — and that it would be unconstitutional to do so.
His administration further argued that Abrego Garcia’s “protection from removal” order is void now that officials have decided that the man is a member of a gang the president deemed a terrorist organization. And Trump’s administration also rejected the idea that it should share any details about the terms or financial agreement under which El Salvador is imprisoning the migrants it sent there.
“We won the Supreme Court case, clearly, 9-0,” Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, said Monday morning on Fox News. He disputed the government’s previous contention in several court filings that Abrego Garcia had been removed mistakenly: “He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador. This was the right person sent to the right place.”
In an Oval Office photo-op with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele on Monday, Trump and Miller — along with Attorney General Pam Bondi — continued to pretend that the administration won at the Supreme Court, with both agreeing that the decision was 9-0 “in our favor.” Miller claimed that the high court found “no district court has the power to compel the foreign policy function of the United States,” while Bondi claimed that the U.S. only had to worry about bringing Abrego Garcia back if El Salvador released him first.
Bukele insisted that he would not, and could not, give up Abrego Garcia. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” he said. “I do not have the power to return him to the United States.”
When Trump was asked on Monday about his assurance last week that he would respect the Supreme Court’s decision, the president responded, “How long do we have to answer this question?” before telling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that she should instead be lauding the administration for deporting criminals. He then attacked her TV ratings.
Trump and his administration clearly do not care about the reality of Abrego Garcia’s case, which is that he was in the U.S. legally, that he has never been charged with a crime, and that the Supreme Court has ruled the government needs to bring him back.
“They’d love to have a criminal released into our country,” Trump told Bukele on Monday, speaking about the media. “These are sick people.”
