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President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has found a spot on the global stage by opening the doors of his prison system to President Trump. Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, explains how Bukele, a self-proclaimed dictator, has gone from a pariah to a partner of Trump.
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The Iowa Republican was pressed on President Trump's policies, including the case of a Salvadoran immigrant who his administration has admitted it mistakenly sent to a prison in El Salvador.
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We speak to Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, and José Olivares, an award-winning investigative journalist specializing in Latin American politics, about El Salvador's immigrant detention collaboration with the United States. Over 300 people have been disappeared to El Salvador's dangerous maximum-security prisons, including at least one man who was targeted for removal by mistake. U.S. President Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele now say they have no power to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States, despite a Supreme Court order to "facilitate" his return. "What we saw yesterday was political theater and a set of administration officials lying to the American public," says Gupta about Trump and Bukele's meeting Monday in the Oval Office, which was open to the press. "Donald Trump and his administration can absolutely bring home Mr. Abrego Garcia. That is well within their power and authority." Olivares recounts the origins of U.S.-Salvadoran collaboration and the Salvadoran government's own close ties to the MS-13 criminal organization.
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President Trump's aides abruptly said the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, had been lawfully sent to a prison in El Salvador, contradicting what officials themselves have said in court filings.
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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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