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Abrego Garcia is a fake gangster. Trump and Bukele are not.
Trump's filthy deal with El Salvador is an indictment of him, not the deportees.
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On April 14, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele sat in the Oval Office for a press conference with President Trump and several members of his cabinet.
“Mr. President Bukele, we thank you very much for your partnership. It has been wonderful for us to be able to have somewhere to send the worst of the worst and someone to partner with,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem gushed over the arrangement to rendition immigrants to Bukele’s CECOT gulag.
Bukele was similarly effusive: “We're very happy and we're very eager to help. We know that you have a crime problem, a terrorism problem that you need help with, and we're a small country, but if we can help, we will do it.”
The two leaders lavished praise on each other for their heroic efforts to fight the criminal gang MS-13 and “save” their respective nations.
“Mr. President, you have 350 million people to liberate,” Bukele went on. “But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. That's the way it works, right?”
It was a bizarre display, since the US government only secured Bukele’s cooperation by agreeing to drop prosecutions of multiple high-ranking members of the MS-13 gang, paving the way for them to be sent back to El Salvador. A spokeswoman for Bukele framed this as “a matter of honor.” But in fact Bukele was desperate to hide evidence that he’d made multiple deals with MS-13, trading better treatment in prisons for reductions in violence and political support for his Neuva Ideas party.
Last month, ProPublica reported on Joint Task Force Vulcan, a multi-agency operation working since 2019 to dismantle MS-13 which “found evidence that the Bukele government tried to cover up the pact by preventing the extraditions of gang leaders who faced US charges that include ordering the murders of US citizens and plotting to assassinate an FBI agent.”
An indictment filed in December 2020 against 14 members of the gang alleged that the Bukele government actively worked to evade US extradition requests for members of the gang.
This week, the New York Times reported on the unraveling investigation:
Indeed, when the United States originally asked El Salvador to extradite Mr. Canales, “high-level Salvadoran officials” set the gang leader up in a luxury apartment, gave him a firearm and then, prosecutors said, made arrangements to get him out of the country. He remained a fugitive until he was caught by Mexican authorities and placed in American custody in November 2023.
As the Vulcan team pursued its second case, investigators found evidence that it was not just a “few bad apples” in the Bukele administration working with MS-13. There were ties to the gang at “the highest level of government,” one former official with knowledge of the inquiry said.
And yet in the weeks leading up to the Oval Office meeting, the government quietly dropped cases against multiple MS-13 defendants they worked for years to build cases against.
“The United States has determined that sensitive and important foreign policy considerations outweigh the government’s interest in pursuing the prosecution of the defendant, under the totality of the circumstances, and therefore require dismissal of the case,” prosecutor John J. Durham (son of the former special counsel) wrote to Judge Joan Azrack.
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Trump constantly calls immigrant gang members an existential threat to America. He even based his March 15 Alien Enemies Act proclamation on the demonstrably false claim that the US is being invaded by members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, who are working as proxies of that country’s government.
And yet a month later, he was mugging in the Oval Office with a leader whose entire regime is in bed with MS-13.
The man in the middle
Trapped at the center of this controversy is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a construction worker in Maryland who was minding his own business on March 12, picking his son up from his grandmother’s house, when Department of Homeland Security agents pulled over his car and told him his “status had changed.”
After waiting for his wife to come retrieve their child — she says agents told her she had 10 minutes to get there or they’d turn the boy over to child protective services — Abrego began his dystopian journey through several prisons and at least two countries.
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