The Salvadoran president, who is doing Trump’s deportation dirty work by throwing deportees in a horror prison, “quietly expressed concerns” about who exactly the U.S. is sending him, according to The New York Times.
Before his brash appearance in the Oval Office earlier this month, Nayib Bukele reportedly raised his eyebrows after three planeloads of deportees landed from the U.S.
The New York Times cited sources and documentation that detailed Bukele’s anxiety about whether the men his country had received were even criminals at all.
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After a tour of the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) with Matt Gaetz and Trump’s Latin American envoy in July, Bukele said his country would accept violent criminals, no matter where they are from, for a fee. That is said to be $6 million.
He said that money would then fund the country’s prison system.
He reportedly demanded assurances that the would-be prisoners were actually members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational gang originally from Venezuela. The Trump administration has designated the gang a “foreign terrorist organization”.
His demands were delivered with such veracity, The Times reported, that there was a scramble to appease his government with as much supporting documentation as possible.
The Times added that the demands could mean Trump’s administration sent some of these prisoners, mostly men, to a dangerous foreign prison without sufficient background checks.
His administration’s use of the 1798 law used to justify his expulsion of immigrants, the Alien Enemies Act, was “haphazard,” the publication stated.
This was evidenced by the fact that eight women were flown to CECOT, an all-male facility. They had to be returned to the U.S.
“The president has the right to remove foreign terrorists from our homeland, and we are absolutely confident that truth will ultimately prevail in court,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Times.
Her comment comes as Trump’s administration jostles with federal courts over his use of the Alien Enemies Act.
“In the meantime, the administration continues to comply with all court orders,” she added.
Some American law enforcement officials, meanwhile, were concerned about some of Bukele’s demands. He had name-checked specific high-ranking MS-13 gang members he wanted returned to El Salvador to be grilled by his own goons in return for his prison hospitality.
Bukele is infamous in El Salvador for his takedown of gangs but has also been accused by U.S. prosecutors of secretly negotiating with them.
He also requested some leaders who had been charged with crimes in the U.S. The Trump administration has agreed to send a dozen leaders, but Bukele has not received any on his wish list so far, the Times reported.
“We’ve caught hundreds of them, the Venezuelan gang, which is as bad as it gets,” Trump boasted in mid-March, the day he invoked the Alien Enemies Act.
“And you’ll be reading a lot of stories tomorrow about what we’ve done with them and you’ll be very impressed.”
However, the Supreme Court has since ruled that any potential deportees are legally allowed their day in court in the U.S.
It has also ruled that the Trump administration must “facilitate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia‘s return to the U.S. after the government admitted that it deported the Maryland man due to an “administrative error.”
Trump officials have ignored the calls to bring back Abrego Garcia, arguing that he is a member of MS-13.
