The president of El Salvador said in a meeting with Donald Trump in the White House on Monday that he would not order the return of a Maryland man who was deported in error to a Salvadorian mega-prison.
“The question is preposterous,” Nayib Bukele said in the Oval Office on Monday. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it.”
He added: “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” and said he would not release the man, Kilmar Abrego García, into El Salvador either. “I’m not very fond of releasing terrorists into the country.”
The comments came a day after the Trump administration claimed it was not legally obligated to secure the return of Abrego García, despite the US supreme court ruling that the administration should “facilitate” bringing him back.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration acknowledged that Abrego García, an immigrant from El Salvador who was living in Maryland with protected status, was deported to a prison in El Salvador on 15 March as a result of an “administrative error”. In 2019 an immigration judge had prohibited the federal government from deporting him.
Trump officials defiant over wrongly deported man
The Trump administration escalated its stubborn defiance against securing the release of a man wrongly deported to El Salvador on Monday, advancing new misrepresentations of a US supreme court order.
“The ruling solely stated that if this individual at El Salvador’s sole discretion was sent back to our country, we could deport him a second time,” said Trump’s policy chief Stephen Miller. His remarks went beyond the tortured reading offered by the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, who also characterized the supreme court order as only requiring the administration to provide transportation to Abrego García if released by El Salvador.
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Palestinian Columbia student activist detained by Ice
A Palestinian green card holder and student at Columbia University was apprehended by US immigration authorities on Monday, according to his lawyers and a video of the incident. Mohsen Mahdawi, who was a leader of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia last spring, was arrested by Ice on Monday morning in Colchester, Vermont, while he was attending a naturalization interview, his lawyer said in a statement to the Guardian.
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Trump administration sued over tariffs in trade court
A legal advocacy group on Monday asked the US court of international trade to block Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on foreign trading partners, arguing that the president overstepped his authority. The lawsuit was filed by the Liberty Justice Center, a legal advocacy group, on behalf of five US businesses that import goods from countries targeted by the tariffs.
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US begins inquiry into pharmaceutical and chip imports, paving way for tariffs
The Trump administration is kicking off investigations into imports of pharmaceuticals and semiconductors as part of a bid to impose tariffs on both sectors on national security grounds, notices posted to the Federal Register on Monday showed.
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Harvard will not ‘yield’ to Trump demands over $9bn in cuts
Harvard University said on Monday that it will not comply with a new list of demands from the Trump administration issued last week that the government says are designed to crack down on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations at elite academic institutions.
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Memo outlines plan to slash US state department budget in half
The Trump administration is reportedly proposing to slash the state department budget by nearly half in a move that could drastically reduce US international spending and end its funding for Nato and the United Nations, according to an internal memorandum.
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US soldier revealed as neo-Nazi TikTok follower
An active-duty serviceman in the US army is openly following a proscribed neo-Nazi terrorist group on social media, one that has vowed to recruit soldiers in preparation for a so-called race war. Experts say examples like this shows how under Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon is allowing extremism to go unchecked.
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Catching up? Here’s what happened on 13 April 2025.