Giving the benefit of the doubt here to the OP, but from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_system we have this definition:
> A presidential, strong-president, or single-executive system is a form of government in which a head of government (usually titled “president”) heads an executive branch that derives its authority and legitimacy from a source that is separate from the legislative branch. The system was popularized by its inclusion in the Constitution of the United States.
So perhaps “The US also has a strong-president system” as per the Wikipedia definition is what the reference was towards, which would have been accurate. Skimming over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_El_Salvador and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_El_Salvador make me believe that this is also true of El Salvador (since the Presidency there also derives authority from the Constitution and thus separately from the legislative branch).
cambion
> I think I’m counting at least 3 levels of hearsay for this claim that the US is paying El Salvador to imprison Garcia.
You mean from CBS News to Senator Chris Van Hollen to El Salvadoran Vice President Felix Ulloa?
I’d have thought that a statement from the official El Salvadoran Vice President would have been fairly reliable.
Here’s another source for that information though, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/us/politics/trump-deportation-flights-hearing.html paraphrases White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt as saying “The United States is paying El Salvador $6 million to take in the deportees,” (of which Abrego Garcia was one).
> But we also know, see here, that the Trump administration did ask Bukele to release Garcia, and Bukele said no.
I am familiar with the article—it was actually my source for Bukele’s “smuggling” quote. Another Bukele quote from the article is, “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”
The closest that the article comes to saying that Bukele is refusing to send Garcia back is when it quotes Bukele as so: “said ‘of course’ he would not release him back to U.S. soil.” But as this is partly rewritten it is worth revisiting what Bukele actually said. Which is, “I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terroist into the United States. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.” (Source: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.74.0_5.pdf )
So Bukele is refusing to smuggle Garcia back, and going on record as not having the power to return him to the United States. But perhaps Bukele would send Garcia back if the US guaranteed Garcia’s safe return and asked nicely in a well worded letter.
Also worth noting that the AP article is from April 14th but the CBS article reporting on Van Hollen and Felix Ulloa is from April 16. So I think the editors of the AP article might have just gotten it wrong and misquoted Bukele, but understandbly so because they didn’t have all the details (the reveal from Ulloa not happening for another two days).
If Bukele was misquoted and is simply refusing to smuggle Garcia in (which no one is asking for), then there’s no contradiction between the reported remarks of Bukele and Ulloa. But if Bukele is in fact saying he was asked and he refuses to send Garcia back, then he and Ulloa seem to disagree. (Though another hypothetical possibility that would fit is that El Salvador was indeed paid, and the US administration did ask for Garcia back as well as the payments (that is, asking for a refund), and Bukele refused and said he’d only send Garcia back if El Salvador was allowed to keep the money.)
Importantly, no one in the article or elsewhere (including in the court document submission) says that someone in the US administration asked an official of El Salvador to return Garcia. It’s never spelled out that someone has actually asked this, even though there’s an active court case related to that very point (so if someone had indeed asked, the evidence of this would likely have been submitted to that court—granted that we might not know about it if it was done in camera, but as of April 21 no submissions have ever been made under seal).
> If such payments are actually occurring, then I agree we should stop them and see what happens, but I would bet against it resulting in Garcia’s release.
Actually I would emphasize caution here, and precisely for that reason. Perhaps there are other consequences to stopping the payments that haven’t been publicly revealed? Or even that threatening to withhold payments blindly might inflame the situation and make it harder to get Garcia back, when instead offering a carrot would work better? The courts are correct not to directly order this (at least not at this early stage), it’s best left to the Executive to find the right way to facilitate Garcia’s return while otherwise managing the foreign affairs of the United States.
That said, another possibility is that the payments are actually a prepaid lump sum. That is, El Salvador got paid in full first and took in people, including Garcia, only afterwards. So the payments cannot be stopped because they’re already completed.
> That says to me that even if there are payments coming from the US, those payments are definitely not the only reason El Salvador has to keep Garcia imprisoned. They have other reasons of their own.
This also seems to contradict the CBS article, where Ulloa told Van Hollen that the payments were the reason that El Salvador could not release Garcia.
> Unless you have an El Selvadoran law degree I don’t know about, or have consulted someone who does, you should not be particularly confident what powers Bukele has.
This is a good point. So see https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-01-29/how-a-salvadoran-gangster-duped-the-bukele-government-with-a-fake-scheme-to-catch-an-ms-13-fugitive-wanted-by-the-us.html in regards to a different individual being released by the El Salvadoran government—albeit that it may not have been fully legal under Salvadoran law as per https://elfaro.net/en/202210/el_salvador/26446/Police-Documents-Prove-Illegal-Release-of-MS-13-Leader-in-El-Salvador.htm
In short, Burkele seems to have the ability to do this, as demonstrated by the past actions of his government.
Furthermore, the government was able to move Garcia out of CECOT (into a different jail) as well as bring Garcia to Chris Van Hollen for a meeting, as per https://www.newsweek.com/kilmar-abrego-garcias-new-prison-location-revealed-trump-admin-2062317 (granted that this isn’t the same as releasing him or sending him out of the country).
> But even if you are right that Bukele has the power to release Garcia, so what? Bukele doesn’t work for Trump.
As per https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/kilmar-abrego-garcia-el-salvador-maryland-man-deported/ Chris Van Hollen was informed by the vice president of El Salvador that the reason Garcia can not be released, is because the US is paying El Salvador to keep him imprisoned.
While it is accurate to say that “Bukele doesn’t work for Trump” the fact that Garcia seems to be imprisoned solely due to the US paying for it, suggests that Garcia is constructively in US custody.
> What reason do we have to think that Trump could convince Bukele to release Garcia?
Well, threaten to stop the above payments, for one.
> If we read it as the administration has, that they are simply obligated to ask for Garcia’s release and, if Bukele agrees, to transport Garcia out of El Salvador, then that seems like a fine and reasonable response to what has happened here.
But have they even asked? There seems to be no public record that the administration officially asked for this. And in my view, Bukele’s public words about “smuggling Garcia” into the US is actually well-worded—he can’t force the US to accept and take Garcia in (absent an agreement from the US that they are in fact willing to take Garcia back). So it seems to me that Bukele’s public statements don’t contradict the view that the US administration has not yet asked for Garcia to be returned.
> But if the courts interpret “facilitate” the way the liberal media is, as requiring Trump to get Garcia back regardless of the political or legal realities in El Salvador
That might be the way the media is interpreting it but the courts are not. They’re simply asking what steps the administration can do, and what the administration has already done. In other words, the Executive is expected to take the lead here on determining what can be done—but the courts want it well documented (for fear that the administration is simply saying “We’ve tried nothing and are out of ideas”).
> this situation may be equivalent to the courts ordering Trump to make the sun rise in the west and set in the east, and then being outraged when Trump doesn’t do it.
Actually that’s a bad analogy. It’s not possible to make the sun rise in the west and set in the east. Whereas the US could, e.g., attempt to militarily invade El Salvador and take over the facility where Garcia is being held, and then free him. No court would order this; and it’s an astoundingly bad idea in this case. But it’s a possibility (even if not guaranteed).
More reasonably, the court could simply order that the US withhold payments to El Salvador. No court has even done that yet. The court hasn’t even required that the US send the kind of letter mentioned earlier.
The court is willing to let the Executive decide what steps to take, but there must be something attempted to “facilitate”.
> That is the scenario that threatens to tear this country apart. That is the scenario that frightens me.
I imagine that’s why the court isn’t ordering the administration to take any specific action (sending a letter, withholding payments, or worse). The court is trying hard to get the administration to show that it is indeed making the attempt to facilitate Garcia’s return while not overstepping its authority on the actual decision making process.
As the Supreme Court said that the courts should show proper deference to the fact that the Executive branch is responsible for things like foreign diplomacy and relationships with other countries, so it seems to me that the lower courts are trying to show that they are in fact providing this deference.
> And that is the scenario that you make more likely when you just assert, without evidence or reason, that Trump could get Garcia back if he wanted to.
I think the one thing that everyone agrees here is that “facilitate” doesn’t mean that the US could get Garcia back if El Salvador absolutely refuses. Just that the US has to try, e.g. by asking nicely.
Agreed. I’d also add that, while it would be acceptable at least for someone in the US Administration to simply state that El Salvador’s administration did refuse to release Garcia (instead of, for example, demanding that such evidence can only come from Bukele himself), this hasn’t actually happened. No one will even go on the record as saying that they tried asking, or were aware of efforts to make this ask.