El Salvador is said to have spurned US request for return of deported migrant

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador meets with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, April 14, 2025. Bukele has reportedly refused a Trump administration diplomatic request to release a Salvadoran immigrant whom the Justice Department says was wrongly deported there. It remained unclear whether the diplomatic effort was a genuine. (Eric Lee/The New York Times)

By Michael S. Schmidt, Alan Feuer, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Maggie Haberman and Maria Abi-Habib

The Trump administration recently sent a diplomatic note to officials in El Salvador to inquire about releasing a Salvadoran immigrant whom government officials have been ordered by the Supreme Court to help free, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

But the authoritarian government of Nayib Bukele, the leader of El Salvador, said no, two of the people said. The Bukele administration claimed the man should stay in El Salvador because he is a Salvadoran citizen, according to one of those people.

It remained unclear whether the diplomatic effort was a genuine bid by the White House to address the plight of the immigrant, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who administration officials have repeatedly acknowledged was improperly expelled to El Salvador last month in violation of a court order expressly prohibiting him from being sent there.

Some legal experts suggested that the sequence of events could have been an attempt at window dressing by officials seeking to give the appearance of being in compliance with the recent Supreme Court ruling ordering the White House to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release.

The disclosure about the note adds to the confusion about the Trump administration’s efforts to free Abrego Garcia and whether it is seeking to comply with court orders. Even as the administration appeared to be moving privately to work toward Abrego Garcia’s release, it has publicly expressed unwillingness to bring him back to the United States.

The revelation came just hours after the president, reversing course on his administration’s previous statements, said in an interview with ABC News that he had the ability to bring Abrego Garcia back. The president added that he did not believe Abrego Garcia was a good person and that his administration’s lawyers would decide. The Justice Department is also facing a court-ordered deadline of early next week to provide information about what it has done to seek his freedom.

The White House declined to comment on the diplomatic note. A spokesperson for the State Department did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Bukele did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But in a statement, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said, “In the Oval Office, President Bukele made it very clear he will not be smuggling Abrego Garcia, who is a designated foreign terrorist, MS-13 gang member and El Salvadoran national, back into the United States.”

Judge Paula Xinis, who is overseeing Abrego Garcia’s case in U.S. District Court in Maryland, has opened an inquiry in the case. She is looking into whether Trump officials acted in bad faith by ignoring both her instructions and the Supreme Court’s to work toward freeing Abrego Garcia and obtaining for him the sort of due process he would have been afforded if he had not been wrongfully sent to El Salvador on March 15.

Xinis, after putting that investigation on an extraordinary two-week fast track, abruptly placed it on hold last week after the Trump administration asked for a delay after revealing that the State Department had “engaged in appropriate diplomatic discussions with El Salvador regarding Abrego Garcia.”

On Tuesday, the Justice Department asked for an additional delay, but Xinis rejected the request after a sealed court proceeding Wednesday.

That left the administration still facing a deadline of Monday to give Abrego Garcia’s lawyers detailed information about who authorized his detention in El Salvador and what steps the White House has taken, and intends to take, on seeking his release. The lawyers will also take depositions no later than May 9 of four Trump administration aides, including Michael G. Kozak, a State Department official.

Stephen Miller, the architect of President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda, and Attorney General Pam Bondi had said that because Abrego Garcia was in a Salvadoran prison, the responsibility of his release falls solely on Bukele. The Justice Department has argued it would be complying with the Supreme Court’s order to facilitate Abrego’s Garcia’s return by simply letting him into the United States if he were ever to make it to a port of entry.

Sitting alongside Trump in the Oval Office this month, Bukele said he would not release Abrego Garcia, arguing that it would be akin to releasing a terrorist.

But in his interview with ABC News on Tuesday, Trump acknowledged that he did have power to bring Abrego Garcia back. He said his administration, specifically his government lawyers, simply did not want to.

“I’m not the one making this decision,” Trump said in the interview. “We have lawyers that don’t want to do this.”

Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that the Supreme Court had given Trump “a graceful way” out of the legal morass involving Abrego Garcia by ordering him merely to take steps to seek the migrant’s release from foreign custody. The diplomatic note might have satisfied the Supreme Court’s demands, albeit in an extremely narrow way, he added.

“But as usual the president is his own worst enemy in court,” Vladeck said. “When you have the president publicly saying there are things he can do but is choosing not to do, I think any federal judge or Supreme Court justice worth their salt may eventually order him to do those things. I think if the president had just kept his mouth shut, the government’s case would have been a lot stronger.”