A federal judge on Friday ordered the Justice Department to tell her more about a deal struck between the Trump administration and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to imprison immigrants deported from the United States in a Salvadoran maximum-security facility in exchange for the return of top leaders of the MS-13 gang who are in U.S. custody.
The order by the judge, Joan M. Azrack, came as she was considering a request by federal prosecutors on Long Island to dismiss sprawling narco-terrorism charges against Vladimir Arévalo Chávez, who is alleged to be one of those leaders, in preparation for sending him back to El Salvador.
It remains unclear how the Justice Department will respond to Judge Azrack’s demand for information, but her order could help pierce the veil of secrecy around the arrangement between Mr. Bukele and the Trump administration. That deal is at the heart of one of the White House’s most controversial deportation efforts, which involved the expulsion in March of more than 200 Venezuelans to a prison built for terrorists in El Salvador. The Trump administration deported some of them by invoking a rarely used wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.
In exchange for taking the deportees, the Bukele government received millions of dollars from the United States, as well as the Trump administration’s pledge to return top MS-13 leaders who are facing charges in federal court.
An investigation by The New York Times found that the returning of the gang leaders to El Salvador was threatening a long-running federal investigation into the upper echelons of MS-13. Prosecutors had amassed substantial evidence of ties between the gang and the Bukele administration — and had been scrutinizing Mr. Bukele himself, The Times found.
Judge Azrack recently said that U.S. government had detailed in court filings allegations of “extraordinary and corrupt arrangements between MS-13 and the Salvadoran government.”
Prosecutors have offered little explanation for why they suddenly want to drop the charges against Mr. Arévalo, citing only “important foreign policy considerations” and “national security concerns.”
In her brief order, Judge Azrack gave prosecutors until Aug. 8 to explain in writing what role the deal with Mr. Bukele might have played in their request to throw out Mr. Arévalo’s case.
During a hearing on Thursday in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y., the judge cited recent news reports about the deal, including one that described how the Salvadoran government had asked for the return of nine MS-13 members in exchange for giving the U.S. government a 50 percent discount on the original $6 million fee it had paid to house immigrants in the Salvadoran prison system.
“The alleged arrangement to trade nine MS-13 defendants for a 50 percent discount raises a number of questions, in my view, about the propriety and merits of this reported deal,” she said. “For one thing, why would the United States trade nine defendants who are alleged to be high-level members of MS-13 for $3 million? Is that a good deal for the United States?”
At the hearing, Judge Azrack also noted the prisoner swap last week in which the Venezuelans who had been sent to the prison in El Salvador were returned to their homeland. In exchange, Venezuela released 10 Americans and U.S. permanent residents who had been seized by the Venezuelan authorities and held as bargaining chips.
In her order, she said she wanted to know if federal prosecutors were still intending to dismiss Mr. Arévalo’s case in light of that development.
Judge Azrack said she wanted a written response after the lead prosecutor on the case, John J. Durham, did not provide her with much information during the hearing, saying that he needed to confer with other Trump administration officials. Mr. Durham once led a special cross-agency investigative unit called Joint Task Force Vulcan, which had brought two indictments against those believed to be the highest-ranking leaders in MS-13, including Mr. Arévalo.
Mr. Arévalo has been vigorously fighting the possibility of being deported to El Salvador, with his lawyers arguing in court filings that U.S. officials know he is likely to be “tortured or ‘disappeared’” if he is returned there.
This week, the court made public a letter Mr. Arévalo wrote to Judge Azrack late last month. In the handwritten message, which was dated June 30, Mr. Arévalo claimed that his life would be in danger if he was sent back to his homeland.
“I will be tortured and desposed of as it happen’d to another who was deported,” he wrote. “My family was and is under herasment and is in danger. So I am asking your honor for urgent help to save my life and the life of my family.”
Judge Azrack, a former prosecutor, has already expressed doubts about the Justice Department’s efforts to ship MS-13 members back to El Salvador in secret. Just last week, she chided Mr. Durham and his team for trying to “avoid public scrutiny” in their efforts to deport Mr. Arévalo by asking that court papers involved in the case be kept under seal.
In her order Friday, Judge Azrack said Mr. Arévalo’s lawyers could file a request to her to force the government to reveal more information about how the deal between the U.S. and El Salvador had affected their client’s case.
So far, it appears that only one top member of the gang, César López Larios, has been returned to El Salvador under the terms of the arrangement between the Trump and Bukele administrations. Mr. López was put on a plane to El Salvador in March with the Venezuelan deportees who ended up at the maximum-security terrorism prison. He had been in U.S. custody for less than a year and was awaiting trial on Long Island on narco-terrorism conspiracy charges.
As part of her order, Judge Azrack asked for more information about another, lower-level MS-13 member, Henrry Josue Villatoro Santos, whose federal indictment in Virginia was dismissed in April. When Mr. Villatoro was arrested on gun charges in March, Attorney General Pam Bondi touted the arrest as a great success, describing the defendant as the “worst of the worst.”
“Make no mistake — he was one of the top leaders, heading up all MS-13 violent crimes on the East Coast,” Ms. Bondi said.
Less than two weeks later, however, prosecutors had already moved to dismiss his case in an apparent bid to send him back El Salvador. Judge Azrack revealed in court on Thursday that Mr. Villatoro had first sought to challenge his deportation in a sealed lawsuit but had then withdrawn his claim after an immigration hearing on June 3.
She told the Justice Department she wanted to know where Mr. Villatoro was now and the status of his immigration case.
Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting from Central Islip, N.Y.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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