Man mistakenly deported ‘not coming back to our country,' says US attorney general

By Diyar Guldogan

WASHINGTON (AA) - A US resident who was wrongly deported to El Salvador is "not coming back" to the United States, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Wednesday.

"He is an illegal alien who has been living illegally in our country from El Salvador," Bondi told reporters about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which has drawn considerable controversy and edged towards a possible judicial/executive branch clash.

Abrego Garcia, 29, was deported to his native country on March 15 along with hundreds of alleged Salvadoran and Venezuelan gang members, even though a court order in a separate case barred him from being removed from the US. The deportees were not given any due process that might have offered them a chance to dispute the government’s gang membership allegations.

"He should not be in our country. He was deported," Bondi said, calling him a foreign terrorist and an MS-13 member.

"So he is not coming back to our country," said Bondi, stressing that El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, during his Monday Oval Office meeting with US President Trump, ruled out returning Abrego Garcia.

"That's the end of the story. If he wanted to send him back, we would give him a plane ride back. There was no situation ever where he was going to stay in this country. None, none," Bondi said.

The Justice Department admitted that it made an error in deporting Abrego Garcia but claimed it did not have the authority to bring him back because he was now in the custody of another country.

After legal wrangling in federal court, the US Supreme Court stepped in last week and ordered the Trump administration to give details on Abrego Garcia's status and to “facilitate” his return to the US.

A US judge ordered Tuesday that Trump administration officials be questioned under oath as part of a two-week process of "expedited discovery" to determine whether the government is doing enough to try to bring back Abrego Garcia.

The government’s apparent resistance of the Supreme Court decision has raised the specter of a constitutional crisis between the executive and judicial branches.