Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated on Sunday that the US had despatched 10 members of two gangs — MS-13, which originated in the US and operates in South America, and Tren de Aragua, rooted in Venezuela — to El Salvador late Saturday.
Mr. Rubio added in a social media post that “the alliance” between President Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador had “change into an instance for safety and prosperity in our hemisphere.”
The deportees despatched to El Salvador this weekend got here from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on an Air Drive C-17 cargo airplane, in response to a social media message posted by El Salvador’s justice minister, Gustavo Villatoro. The administration has been holding some detainees on the U.S. naval base there.
Mr. Villatoro additionally posted a video of males being marched off a navy airplane and led in shackles into a jail referred to as the Terrorism Confinement Heart, or CECOT.
The Trump administration has sent hundreds of Venezuelans to the infamous jail in El Salvador on the invitation of Mr. Bukele, who’s positioning himself as a crucial regional ally to Mr. Trump and is scheduled to satisfy with the president in Washington on Monday.
The administration has portrayed these deportees as violent criminals or terrorists, however court docket papers have proven that the proof on which the federal government acted was usually little more than whether they had tattoos or had worn clothes related to the felony group.
Mr. Bukele has change into Latin America’s hottest chief for his takedown of gangs, at the same time as he has suspended civil liberties and been accused by U.S. prosecutors of secretly negotiating with the identical gangs.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Bukele, Wendy Ramos, didn’t instantly reply to a request for data on the ten deportees Mr. Rubio referred to.
In early February, Mr. Rubio announced a possible deal with Mr. Bukele, underneath which the Salvadoran authorities would maintain convicted criminals in its jail system, for a price. The administration started sending teams of detainees to El Salvador in mid-March, and has to this point despatched not less than 5 flights carrying Venezuelan and Salvadoran deportees to El Salvador.
After every flight, the Salvadoran authorities has launched videos and photos displaying deportees arriving on the jail.
A number of the males have been expelled from the US underneath the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime energy courting to 1798, whereas others were removed underneath common U.S. immigration regulation and had last deportation orders, in response to the administration.
The Supreme Court ruled final week that the Trump administration might proceed to deport Venezuelan migrants utilizing the Alien Enemies Act for now, overturning a decrease court docket that had put a brief cease to these deportations.
The choice represented a victory for the administration, although the ruling didn’t handle the constitutionality of utilizing the Alien Enemies Act to ship the migrants to a jail in El Salvador. The justices as a substitute issued a slim procedural ruling, saying that the migrants’ attorneys had filed their lawsuit within the mistaken court docket.
In a separate case, the Supreme Court ordered the administration on Thursday to take steps to return a Salvadoran man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was legally in the US however was despatched to the jail in El Salvador in March because of what officers stated was an administrative error. However the administration has defied an order by the federal decide dealing with Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case to offer a written highway map of its plans to free him, and in a listening to on Friday, repeatedly stonewalled the decide’s efforts to get essentially the most primary details about him.
On Saturday, a State Division official, Michael Kozak, instructed the Maryland decide in Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case that the detainee was “alive and secure” and that, in response to the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador, he was in being held in CECOT. The embassy has not responded to requests for data from The New York Occasions.
Following the Supreme Court docket’s order on Thursday, President Trump stated that he would comply with the instructions of the court docket if it ordered him to “convey any person again,” although the court docket’s ruling indicated that the judiciary may not have the ability to require the manager department to take action.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump wrote of the deportees on Reality Social: “These barbarians at the moment are within the sole custody of El Salvador, a proud and sovereign Nation. And their future is as much as President B and his Authorities.”
President Bukele, who posted a photo on social media that day indicating that he was on his option to Washington, has largely remained silent on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case.
Gabriel Labrador contributed reporting from San Salvador.
