President Trump told Time magazine that he is essentially doing nothing to comply with the Supreme Court order to bring back wrongly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador.
In an interview published Friday, Trump said he hadn’t asked Salvador President Nayib Bukele to release Abrego Garcia because “nobody asked me to ask him that question.”
Here is the transcript of that absurd moment.
In our interview last year, Mr. President, you committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders.
I said what?
You committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders—
Yeah.
When you and I spoke last April. Are you still committed to complying with all Supreme Court orders?
Sure, I believe in the court system.
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that you have to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You haven’t done so. Aren’t you disobeying the Supreme Court?
Well, that’s not what my people told me—they didn’t say it was, they said it was—the nine to nothing was something entirely different.
Let me quote from the ruling. “The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.” Are you facilitating a release?
I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you’re saying. But I leave that to my lawyers. If they want—and that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country. I don’t make that decision.
Have you asked President Bukele to return him?
I haven’t, uh, he said he wouldn’t.
Did you ask him?
But I haven’t asked him positively, but he said he wouldn’t.
But if you haven’t asked him, then how are you facilitating his release?
Well, because I haven’t been asked to ask him by my attorneys. Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.
Do you believe he deserves his day in court?
I believe that they made him look like a saint, and then we found out about him. He wasn’t a saint. He was MS-13. He was a wife beater and he had a lot of things that were very bad, you know, very, very bad. When I first heard of the situation, I was not happy, and then I found out that he was a person who was an MS-13 member. And in fact, he had a tattooed right on his—I’m sure you saw that—he had it tattooed right on his knuckles: MS-13. No, I believe he’s a man who has got quite a past. This is no longer just a nice, wonderful man from Maryland, which people, which the fake news had me and other people for a period of time believing. Now, nobody believes that. And I think this is a very bad—I think this is another men [in] women’s sports thing for the Democrats.
Trump’s answers here convey both a disdain toward Abrego Garcia and an active ignorance of the critical situation he and the likely hundreds of other wrongfully detained migrants are in. The Supreme Court orders him unanimously to bring back Abrego Garcia, and he just shrugs his shoulders and tells Time that his lawyers said otherwise—“They feel that the order said something very much different from what you’re saying.… Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.”
In the same interview, Trump states again that he would “love to” send U.S. citizens to jails like CECOT if he could.
The post Trump Makes Alarming Confession on Wrongly Deported Immigrant appeared first on New Republic.
