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Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday, part of a growing alliance between the two right-wing leaders. In recent months, El Salvador has imprisoned hundreds of people for the Trump administration who were expelled from the United States with little or no due process, ending up in the brutal mega-prison known as CECOT. One of those men is Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump administration deported despite a protective order meant to prevent his removal from the country. The Trump administration has so far refused to bring Abrego Garcia back, despite a unanimous Supreme Court ruling ordering the government to "facilitate" his return. Bukele, who has described himself as "the world's coolest dictator," has ruled for years under a state of emergency in El Salvador, imprisoning tens of thousands of people without trial as part of a supposed war on gangs. "Never did I imagine that we would be in a situation where the Trump administration, the United States, is looking to El Salvador, to the Bukele administration, saying, 'Huh, we kind of like what you are doing,'" says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa, who just returned from a reporting trip to El Salvador.
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