What Trump Wants From the Nayib Bukele Presser

Stewart Rhodes remains an adjudged terrorist (having gotten a terrorism enhancement at sentencing, in a sentence that Trump commuted but did not pardon). Kilmar Abrego Garcia is not.

I start there because one of the biggest takeaways from the press conference Trump staged with Nayib Bukele today is that the claims that Abrego Garcia — and not the guy whom Trump freed on his first day on the job — is a terrorist went uncontested.

The entire press conference was staged, like a badly written play, and staged to set up tomorrow’s status hearing in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, and with it try to chip away at due process for undocumented people. Yes, in the longer run, Trump wants to set up the legal path to use CECOT as a concentration camp, including for Americans. But in the shorter term, I think Trump is trying to reverse two adverse SCOTUS decisions, the one ruling that everyone gets access to at least a habeas petition before being deported, and the other that would uphold the ruling that Abrego Garcia could be deported, but not to El Salvador.

As far as we know, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a unique fact set among the people deported in the March 15 flights, and my guess is that after John Sauer came in, he decided to reset how DOJ deals with Abrego Garcia because he 1) had a negative ruling in 2019 and 2) is an undocumented Salvadoran citizen.

And so the presser today was designed to present an entirely new argument in the Abrego Garcia case, one that negates the repeated admissions of error (including even from Sauer) already in the court record.

After Kaitlan Collins started asking questions, all the people who should be submitting sworn declarations before Judge Paula Xinis made comments not burdened by oaths or the risk of contempt, rehearsed comments for the cameras.

Pam Bondi misrepresented the two 2019 rulings as findings that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist (as distinct from a ruling that he was not safe to release), and said that she was helpless to get Abrego Garcia back.

Stephen Miller laid out the new game plan at length (one he previewed on Fox beforehand): a claim that the SCOTUS order says the opposite of what it does, a claim that SCOTUS said that so long as this all gets packaged as foreign policy, Trump can deprive Abrego Garcia of his rights. A lie that the plan always to send Abrego Garcia to CECOT for precisely the purpose they’re putting forth today.

Marco Rubio had his speaking part, in which he affirmed the claim that this was all about foreign policy.

And then Bukele claimed he is helpless to return Abrego Garcia because — accepting the unsubstantiated claim that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist — he couldn’t bring someone like that back into the US (never mind that countries, including El Salvador, extradite actual terrorists to the US all the time).

So Bondi claimed to be helpless to ask Buekele to return Abrego Garcia. Bukele claimed to be helpless to return him. Depending on how SCOTUS treats the clear contempt for their ruling, it could have the desired effect, to get John Roberts to claim impotence.

There was no discussion of the US payments to Bukele, or past claims that Bukele is only temporarily holding the US deportees. (Though without the claim that this is temporary, the deportations to be held indefinitely in a third country become far more problematic.) Andrew Weissmann noted that Trump’s hot mic comment that Bukele should build five more camps suggests this is all being done at the US’ behest.

And, of course, there was no discussion that Trump freed a number of adjudged terrorists on his first day in office, his terrorists, terrorists now running free.

The Trump Administration is, in my opinion, trying to move the bar on deportation to a concentration camp. Contrary to Trump’s staged comment (for Bukele’s videographers) that Bukele needs to build five more concentration camps, I don’t think this theater was designed to get all the way to deporting American citizens now, not without more sanction from SCOTUS. I have no doubt he does want to get there, but thus far Trump has given what he does the patina of legal sanction, and he seems to believe he’ll get it here.

But I do think the theater scene was designed to get a second bid on this case from SCOTUS. And until people start focusing on Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that these men — Abrego Garcia and the others — are terrorists, until that claim is defeated politically, then Trump will continue to make legal progress.