Trump says he does not know if El Salvador would return mistakenly deported Kilmar Ábrego García and hasn’t asked
Donald Trump said on Wednesday he did not know how El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, would respond to a request to return a man his administration mistakenly deported from Maryland, adding he has not spoken to him.
At the cabinet meeting earlier, a reporter had pulled Trump up on his comments in his ABC News interview last night that he “could” secure Kilmar Ábrego García’s return but won’t do so, despite the supreme court’s ruling that his administration must facilitate Ábrego García’s return to the US.
Trump said:
I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him. I really leave that to the lawyers and I take my advice from Pam [Bondi] and everybody that is very much involved. They know the laws and we follow the laws exactly.
Key events
Trump’s nominee to lead DEA claims Kilmar Ábrego García’s tattoos are MS-13 related, but Salvadoran expert disagrees
During his confirmation hearing in the Senate on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terrance Cole, was asked to weigh in on the dispute over the meaning of the tattoos on the hand of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man who was deported to El Salvador from Maryland by mistake.
Cole was asked by Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, to say if, “based on your time as a DEA agent in the field, particularly in Mexico, these tattoos are consistent with MS-13 associations”.
As he spoke Graham held up a printed out close-up image of the symbols tattooed on Ábrego García’s hand: a marijuana leaf; a smiley face; a crucifix and a skull.
“Yes, sir, that’s correct”, Cole answered.
“Do you know of any other set of combinations, that would suggest some other organization this represents”, Graham asked.
“Wit this particular one, no sir”, Cole answered, pointing at what appeared to a copy of the print out displayed by Graham.
An official White House account on the social media platform X posted video of this exchange in support of its campaign to tarnish the wrongly deported man by claiming that his tattoos are proof of his membership in the Salvadoran gang MS-13.
However, it is important to note that the image of the tattoos displayed by Graham at the hearing was not the same one that Trump held up in a social media post from the White House earlier this month. The image held up by Trump in that post showed the tattoos but also had text annotation added to interpret the symbols as representing M,S,1 and 3.
In his contentious interview with Terry Moran of ABC News broadcast Tuesday, Trump repeatedly insisted that those letters and numbers were not added to the photo as annotation, but were actually tattooed onto Ábrego García’s knuckles. “He had “M, S, as clear as you can be, not ‘interpreted’, Trump told Moran.
When Moran then tried to explain to Trump that there was no M, S, 1 or 3 on Ábrego García’s hand in a photo taken during his recent meeting with Senator Chris Von Hollen in El Salvador, Trump refused to believe the correspondent. “But they’re there now” Trump said. “He’s got MS-13 on his knuckles” the president of the United States asserted with conviction, despite being wrong.
Cole’s claim appears to clash with what the Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez wrote two weeks ago, in response to the image of Trump holding up the annotated photo: “I covered MS-13 for over a decade: its history, crimes, symbolism, cruelty, pacts with Salvadoran governments. I wrote a book about it. Never, ever, did any of the hundreds of sources I spoke to say anything that would allow us to believe Trump’s strange interpretation of tattoos”.
I covered MS-13 for over a decade: its history, crimes, symbolism, cruelty, pacts with Salvadoran governments. I wrote a book about it. Never, ever, did any of the hundreds of sources I spoke to say anything that would allow us to believe Trump’s strange interpretation of tattoos https://t.co/3kvV49Jezu
— Óscar Martínez (@CronistaOscar) April 19, 2025
The day so far
It’s been a day of many twists and turns for the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, whom the Trump administration has admitted it mistakenly deported to El Salvador and whose return to the US it has been instructed by the supreme court to facilitate. Federal judge Paula Xinis again directed the administration to provide information about its efforts so far, if any, to comply with her order to retrieve him.
It came as Trump told a cabinet meeting that he didn’t know if El Salvador would return Ábrego García and said he had not spoken to president Nayib Bukele. That followed his comments last night to ABC that he “could” secure Ábrego García’s return but he wasn’t going to. As his administration officials continued to publicly express unwillingness to bring Ábrego García back to the US (homeland security secretary Kristi Noem repeated White House assertions that he would only be deported again anyway), the New York Times (paywall) reported that the Trump administration recently sent a diplomatic note to officials in El Salvador, citing sources, to inquire about releasing Ábrego García, to which Bukele had said no.
The Guardian has not independently verified the Times report and it is unclear if this was a genuine bid by the White House to address the plight of Ábrego García or if this was, per the Times, “an attempt at window dressing by officials seeking to give the appearance of being in compliance with the recent supreme court ruling ordering the White House to ‘facilitate’ his release”.
Elsewhere:
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A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to ensure immigrants held at Guantánamo Bay are given a chance to raise any concerns about their safety before deporting them to El Salvador or countries other than their places of origin.
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Mohsen Mahdawi walked out of immigration detention after a federal judge in Vermont ordered his release. The Palestinian green card holder and student at Columbia University had been detained by the Trump administration on 14 April despite not being charged with a crime.
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While the US economy shrank in the first three months of the year, according to official data, triggering fears of an American recession and a global economic slowdown, Trump continued to blame Joe Biden for the figures. “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,” the Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that the contraction “has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!” However, economists said it was largely driven by an unprecedented surge in imports, as consumers and companies braced for the president to impose his controversial wave of tariffs.
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US treasury secretary Scott Bessent said Washington was “ready to sign” a minerals deal with Ukraine. “Our side is ready to sign,” Bessent said, adding that the Ukrainians had “decided last night to make some last-minute changes”. Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko was due to be in Washington today to sign the deal. But a source told Reuters that the US was pushing Ukraine to sign two additional documents as well as the main minerals deal. The Trump administration urged Ukraine to sign all three documents connected to the deal, but Kyiv felt they were not ready yet, Politico reported.
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Donald Trump said Elon Musk, who has taken more of a backseat in the administration recently but was in attendance, could stay “as long as he wants” in his administration, before adding that “at some point he wants to get back home to his cars”.
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House Republicans moved to block Democrats from forcing votes on the Trump administration’s use of Signal, potential conflicts of interest involving Elon Musk and the impact his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has had on local economies and communities.
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The supreme court’s conservative majority seemed open to establishing the country’s first public religious charter school as they weighed a case that could have significant ramifications on the separation of church and state.
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Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem defended Rodney Scott, Trump’s nominee to lead Customs and Border Protection (CBP), after a Democratic senator and former CBP official accused him of mishandling the investigation into the 2010 death of a man detained while trying to enter the country from Mexico.
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Eleven people are under investigation for “illegal, unauthorized leaks to the media of classified intelligence”, the US director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said. The announcement, reported by ABC News, comes nearly a week after Gabbard said three intelligence officials were referred to the justice department for criminal prosecution.
El Salvador rejected US request for release of Kilmar Ábrego García – report
The New York Times (paywall) reports that the Trump administration recently sent a diplomatic note to officials in El Salvador to inquire about releasing Kilmar Ábrego García, whose return to the US government officials have been ordered by the supreme court to facilitate, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
The Guardian has not independently verified the Times report, in which two of the people claimed that El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said no. The Bukele administration said the man should stay in El Salvador because he was a Salvadoran citizen, according to one of the people.
It remained unclear whether the diplomatic effort was a genuine bid by the White House to address the plight of Ábrego García, whom administration officials have repeatedly acknowledged was mistakenly deported to El Salvador last month in violation of a court order expressly prohibiting him from being sent there.
The Times writes: “Some legal experts suggested that the sequence of events could have been an attempt at window dressing by officials seeking to give the appearance of being in compliance with the recent supreme court ruling ordering the White House to ‘facilitate’ his release.”
The story adds to the confusion about the Trump administration’s efforts, if any, to secure Ábrego García’s release and whether it is seeking to comply with court orders. As we’ve been reporting today, it continues to publicly express unwillingness to bring him back to the United States and even repeated suggestions that he would only be deported again if he was to return.
Kristi Noem says Kilmar Ábrego García would be deported immediately if sent back to US
Maya Yang
Kristi Noem, the US homeland security secretary, said that if Kilmar Ábrego García was sent back to the US, the Trump administration “would immediately deport him again”.
Noem repeated White House assertions about Ábrego García, whom the Trump administration has admitted was mistakenly deported to El Salvador last month, in a new interview with CBS.
“[Ábrego García] is not under our control. He is an El Salvador citizen. He is home there in his country. If he were to be brought back to the United States of America, we would immediately deport him again,” Noem said of the 29-year-old who entered the US illegally around 2011 after fleeing gang violence.
Ábrego García was subsequently afforded a federal protection order against deportation to El Salvador. Despite the order, on 15 March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials deported Ábrego García to El Salvador where he was held in the Center for Terrorism Confinement, a controversial mega-prison.
Though the Trump administration admitted that Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error”, it has repeatedly cast him as an MS-13 gang member on television – a claim his wife, a US citizen, and his attorneys staunchly reject. Ábrego García has no criminal record in the US, according to court documents.
Since Ábrego García’s deportation, the Trump administration has refused to bring him back to the US – despite the supreme court unanimously ordering it to “facilitate” his release. On Wednesday a federal judged again directed the Trump administration to provide information about its efforts so far, if any, to comply with her order to retrieve Ábrego García from El Salvador.
Trump officials claim that US courts lack jurisdiction over the matter because Ábrego García is a Salvadorian national and no longer in the US.
Judge re-ups demand that White House show efforts to retrieve Kilmar Ábrego García from El Salvador
A federal judge has again directed the Trump administration to provide information about its efforts so far, if any, to comply with her order to retrieve Kilmar Ábrego García from an El Salvador prison, the Associated Press reports.
The US district judge Paula Xinis in Maryland temporarily halted her directive for information at the administration’s request last week. But with the seven-day pause expiring at 5pm ET, she set May deadlines for officials to provide sworn testimony on anything they have done to return him to the US.
Ábrego García, 29, has been imprisoned in El Salvador for nearly seven weeks, while his mistaken deportation has become a flash point for Donald Trump’s immigration policies and his increasing friction with the US courts.
The president acknowledged to ABC News on Tuesday that he “could” call El Salvador’s president and have Ábrego García sent back. “And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that,” Trump told ABC’s Terry Moran in the Oval Office, as he doubled down on his claims that Ábrego García is a member of the MS-13 gang. Asked by a reporter at his cabinet meeting on Wednesday if Nayib Bukele would respond to a request to return a Ábrego García, Trump said he did not know and he has not spoken to him.
Xinis ordered the Trump administration to return him nearly a month ago, on 4 April. The supreme court ruled on 10 April that the administration must facilitate bringing him back.
But the case only became more heated. Xinis lambasted a government lawyer who couldn’t explain what, if anything, the Trump administration has done. She then ordered officials to provide sworn testimony and other information to document their efforts.
The Trump administration appealed. But a federal appeals court backed Xinis’s order for information in a blistering ruling, saying: “We shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the supreme court’s recent decision.”
The Trump administration resisted, saying the information Xinis sought involved protected state secrets and government deliberations. She in turn scolded government lawyers for ignoring her orders and acting in “bad faith”.
Federal judge limits Trump’s ability to swiftly deport immigrants held at Guantánamo Bay
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Wednesday to ensure immigrants held at Guantánamo Bay are given a chance to raise any concerns about their safety before deporting them to El Salvador or countries other than their places of origin, per Reuters.
The US district judge Brian Murphy in Boston issued the order after immigrant rights advocates argued the administration had violated a court order he issued by flying four Venezuelans held at the US naval base in Cuba to El Salvador on a flight conducted by the Department of Defense.
Murphy in late March had issued a temporary restraining order, which he later extended into an injunction, restricting the Department of Homeland Security’s ability to rapidly deport migrants to countries other than their own without allowing them to first raise concerns about their safety or potential torture.
Donald Trump’s administration argued it did not violate the judge’s order as it only applied to the Homeland Security Department, which oversees US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), not the defense department.
The Department of Justice called three of the four immigrants members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and said the Department of Defense removed them to El Salvador without the knowledge or direction of the homeland security department.
Trump says he does not know if El Salvador would return mistakenly deported Kilmar Ábrego García and hasn’t asked
Donald Trump said on Wednesday he did not know how El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, would respond to a request to return a man his administration mistakenly deported from Maryland, adding he has not spoken to him.
At the cabinet meeting earlier, a reporter had pulled Trump up on his comments in his ABC News interview last night that he “could” secure Kilmar Ábrego García’s return but won’t do so, despite the supreme court’s ruling that his administration must facilitate Ábrego García’s return to the US.
Trump said:
I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him. I really leave that to the lawyers and I take my advice from Pam [Bondi] and everybody that is very much involved. They know the laws and we follow the laws exactly.
‘Stay as long as you want,’ Trump tells Musk at cabinet meeting as billionaire transitions away from Doge role
At his 100th day cabinet meeting earlier, Donald Trump said Elon Musk, who has taken more of a backseat in the administration recently but was in attendance, could stay “as long as he wants” in his administration, before adding that “at some point he wants to get back home to his cars”.
Musk is in damage control mode after Tesla reported a huge dip in both profits and revenues in the first quarter of 2025 amid backlash against his polarizing role in the White House. Tesla has also been hit by a wave of vandalization, attacks and protests during Musk’s time as Trump’s chainsaw-wielding sidekick. “Starting probably next month, May, my time allocation to Doge will drop significantly,” he said last week, adding that he expects to spend one to two days a week continuing his “critical work” at Doge “for as long as the president would like me to do so and as long as it is useful”.
During the cabinet meeting, Trump said to Musk: “We just want to thank you very much. And, you know, you’re invited to stay as long as you want. At some point, he wants to get back home to his cars.”
The billionaire replied: “Great to work with you,” before donning his Doge hat and then his Gulf of America hat, before stacking them on top of one another. “I love the double hat by the way. He’s the only one who can get away with it,” said Trump, to which Musk replied: “I told you I wear a lot of hats. Even my hat has a hat.” All to avid laughter from those in attendance, I kid you not.
“Well, Mr. President, they say I wear a lot of hats. It’s true. Even my hat has a hat.” – @elonmusk at the first Trump Cabinet meeting after reaching 100 days. pic.twitter.com/s7jWrUjb65
— Beatrice Peterson (@MissBeaE on all platforms) (@MissBeaE) April 30, 2025
Earlier this month, the White House said the plan had always been for Musk to refocus on Tesla once he’d completed his “incredible work” at Doge, while the New York Post reported that Musk is “transitioning” from his role – he’s no longer physically based on the White House grounds and is working remotely.
As an unpaid special government employee, Musk is limited to working for the government for 130 days – which expires on 30 May. His looming exit is widely seen as indicative of the unpredictable billionaire having become too great a political liability for Trump.
Earlier this week a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 57% of Americans surveyed disapproved “somewhat” or “strongly” in the way Musk is handling his role in the administration.
Tulsi Gabbard says 11 people under investigation for media leaks – report
Eleven people are under investigation for “illegal, unauthorized leaks to the media of classified intelligence”, the US director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has said.
The announcement, reported by ABC News, comes nearly a week after Gabbard said three intelligence officials were referred to the justice department for criminal prosecution.
It comes as part of a wider crackdown by the Trump administration on leaks to the media. Last week the Associated Press reported that attorney general Pam Bondi said prosecutors would once again have authority to use subpoenas, court orders and search warrants to hunt for government officials who make “unauthorized disclosures” to journalists.
ABC also reported that Gabbard said security clearances have been revoked for 67 individuals. Those include former secretary of state Antony Blinken, former national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and former deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco.
Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi freed after federal judge orders release
Anna Betts
Mohsen Mahdawi has walked out of immigration detention after a federal judge in Vermont ordered his release. The Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University had been detained and ordered deported by the Trump administration on 14 April despite not being charged with a crime.
“The two weeks of detention so far demonstrate great harm to a person who has been charged with no crime,” said Geoffrey Crawford, a US district judge, at a hearing on Wednesday, according to ABC News. “Mr Mahdawi, I will order you released.”
In his ruling, Crawford stated that the evidence before the court “suggests that Mr Mahdawi is neither a flight risk or a danger to the community, and his release will not interfere with his removal proceedings”.
Crawford wrote that the government “failed to demonstrate any legitimate interest in Mr Mahdawi’s continued confinement” and that his “continued detention would likely have a chilling effect on protected speech”.
Crawford ordered that Mahdawi be released from prison on bail, pending the resolution of his case in federal court.
The order allows Mahdawi to continue residing in Vermont and to travel to New York to attend school and meet with his lawyers. His case in federal court will continue alongside separate immigration proceedings.
House speaker Mike Johnson is renting a house from his congressional colleague Darrell Issa, a Republican representative for California, Semafor reports.
In late February, ProPublica reported that the speaker was sharing a home with evangelical pastor Steve Berger (who has attacked the separation of church and state as “a delusional lie” and called multinational institutions “demonic”), just blocks away from the Capitol, in a property owned by a wealthy Tennessee donor who has joined Berger in advocating for and against multiple bills before Congress. A spokesperson told ProPublica at the time that Johnson “has never once spoken to Mr Berger about any piece of legislation or any matter of public policy”. Johnson relocated a month later.
“He’s a friend and needed a place,” Issa told Semafor of the arrangement. Issa purchased the home in March from Republican representative Mark Green of Tennessee, for over $1.5m. A spokesperson with the speaker’s office said: “Representative Issa negotiated a fair market price for the lease of the property to the speaker.”
USPS law enforcement assists ‘mass deportation’ effort using data from mail to find undocumented migrants – report
US Postal Service law enforcement has started working with immigration officials to find undocumented immigrants via mail surveillance, the Washington Post (paywall) has been told.
Citing two people familiar with the effort, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Post reports that the US Postal Inspection Service recently joined a federal task force to locate undocumented migrants using data from mail and packages, to assist the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with its tracking, detaining and deporting efforts.
The sources said immigration officials are looking to gain access to the Postal Inspection Service’s vast surveillance systems such as online account data, package and mail-tracking, credit card and financial information, IP addresses, and even photographs of the exterior of envelopes and packages, known as “mail covers”.
GOP poll shows plurality of voters opposed to cuts to Medicaid even to lower national debt
New internal GOP polling shows a plurality of American voters are opposed to spending cuts to Medicaid even when framed as an effort to lower national debt, Axios reports.
In a warning sign for Republican lawmakers weighing deep spending cuts, a plurality of independent voters – and voters overall – were opposed to Medicaid cuts to lower the national debt, according to the poll by Gray House shared with Senate Republicans.
A number of key moderate Republicans in both chambers have made clear they will not vote for any bill that includes such cuts to Medicaid. But, Axios notes, conservatives eager to make a dent in the growing national debt are pushing for more than $1tn in spending cuts – which would be likely impossible without impacting Medicaid.
Confusingly, last night at his 100-day rally, Donald Trump proclaimed that Republicans were going to somehow increase spending on Medicaid. It’s set to be a major political fight over what will be Trump’s flagship legislation – his “one big, beautiful bill” – with a current expected deadline of 4 July.
Chris Stein
Rodney Scott’s answers were not good enough for top Senate finance committee Democrat Ron Wyden, who said it remained unclear if he followed the law during the investigation of a man who died in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody in San Diego 15 years ago.
“We didn’t hear any response to the internal affairs high-ranking official who at the time said the investigation was a cover up,” Wyden said, adding that he was also not assured that Scott used a subpoena to obtain the victim’s medical records legally.
The senator also questioned Scott about a comment he made on social media to a former border patrol employee turned critic, where he said “lean back, close your eyes and just enjoy the show” – a comment Wyden noted a judge said was a “classic rape threat”. Scott replied that he had apologized in-person to the critic.
Wyden also demanded answers about Scott’s presence in a Facebook group in which border patrol employees mocked immigrants and shared fake, sexually explicit images about members of Congress.
“Should you have been a member of this Facebook group with all of this ugliness being sort of business as usual?” Wyden asked.
“There were 9,000 people on that group. To say that a few that actually posted something inappropriate, were held accountable, and were disciplined are a reflection of everyone else on that group, I think, is just a [mischaracterization],” Scott replied.
Chris Stein
At Rodney Scott’s confirmation hearing to lead Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Republican chair of the Senate finance committee Mike Crapo questioned him about the subpoena he signed for the medical records of Anastasio Hernández Rojas.
“The subpoena was information gathering” that was common practice when an individual dies in CBP custody, as was the case with Hernández Rojas, Scott said.
“And did you do anything in the investigation of that case to interfere with the investigation of that case?” Crapo asked.
“Absolutely not,” Scott replied.
The United Parcel Service (UPS) is expected to cut about 20,000 jobs in 2025 as a part of a larger plan to reduce costs and increase profit, citing “changes in the global trade policy and new or increased tariffs”.
UPS announced the layoffs on Tuesday in its first quarter earnings report. The company also said it would be closing 73 leased and owned buildings by the end of June of this year.
“The actions we are taking to reconfigure our network and reduce cost across our business could not be timelier,” Carol Tomé, UPS chief executive officer said in a statement.
“The macro environment may be uncertain, but with our actions, we will emerge as an even stronger, more nimble UPS.”
The report also said that UPS anticipated “lower volumes” from the company’s largest customer, Amazon.
Read more about it here:
Donald Trump is continuing to push for even stricter immigration policies in his first cabinet meeting after celebrating 100 days in office.
“We have to get the criminals out of this country,” Trump said. “That’s the basis on which we won this election.”
His comments come at a time when the president’s approval rating has flipped amid ongoing and frequent cases of people in the US being detained by Ice, as well as controversial deportations.
