This is an adapted excerpt from the April 14 episode of “The Beat with Ari Melber.”

The story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man stuck in a Salvadoran prison — where the Supreme Court has ruled he should not be and where the Trump administration admits he was mistakenly sent — has consumed public attention in the United States, marking a flashpoint in Donald Trump’s aggressive second-term deportation efforts.

While the Supreme Court ordered the administration to follow a lower judge’s ruling and facilitate Garcia’s return last week, the president is now trying to hide behind the Central American country and claim he suddenly has no power. On Monday, Trump met with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele at the White House. During that meeting, Bukele followed Trump’s playbook and echoed the administration’s claims.

“How can I return him to the United States? I smuggle him into the United States? Of course, I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said. “It’s like the question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”

Bukele is now effectively helping Trump to defy the Supreme Court order. There are established, detailed protocols for the legal passage of individuals between countries, from routine tourism and migration to extradition for defendants and detainees to exactly what happened in this case.

Trump and Bukele’s explanation is legally weak since administrations often face court rulings that require some diplomacy or foreign policy work to right a wrong. It’s also factually dubious since Trump is waging a trade war he built on his belief that his administration can make other countries do things, whether they like it or not.

Monday’s White House display showed how the Trump administration has used a mix of defiance, bad faith and its own brand of foreign policy to get another country to claim some kind of catch-22 in which both leaders blame each other and claim they cannot do what the highest court in the United States has ordered.

And what did the court order? While the Supreme Court did uphold that lower court ruling against the president, it also left a crack open for the administration, stating that the order to “facilitate” Garcia’s return be followed, with deference to a president’s foreign policy power. When the news of the court’s ruling first broke, I spoke about how an administration operating in bad faith could exploit the court’s language as a loophole.

That is exactly what the administration is doing, from the president down to Justice Department lawyers, who are laying out in new filings that they brazenly view the ruling as a suggestion with no binding, legal obligation to make the return happen.

They claim that the ruling only requires officials to admit Garcia into the country if he makes it back from El Salvador, a formulation that taunts the high court since a prisoner is not going to make it back on his own. The Justice Department has noted the Maryland father is alive and still in prison but has offered no other details, despite a judge’s demand for daily updates.

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Trump floats alarming deportation idea while meeting with El Salvador’s president April 15, 2025 / 11:39

So here we are. It’s not all doom and gloom for the rule of law, but it’s not exactly a sunny day, either. On the one hand, the Supreme Court did rule against Trump unanimously; on the other, the high court left a way for the administration to duck the clear purpose of the order. Whatever the court’s reasoning to do this, it’s obvious that an administration that gets away with such ploys will be incentivized to do so again, which risks further legal crises.

While there are hard, complex cases in law and immigration, this is not one of them. The administration admits it made an “administrative error” in deporting Garcia to El Salvador; no one in the case claims that’s where he should be. If the high court cannot effectively wield its legal powers to return one person who is in the wrong place, when everyone agrees that a mistake was made, how can it maintain the rule of law in this Trump era on much harder cases? 

Imagine if the “mistake” was not sending Garcia to the wrong country but picking up the wrong person entirely or deporting an innocent American citizen to a foreign prison. If that happened, under the Trump administration’s current legal position, the Justice Department could claim it still has no obligation to fix it and that it’s up to the other country to do so.

In a separate ruling against Trump’s deportation efforts last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned against exactly that. “United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes … History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this Nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.”

Sotomayor is telling the public that if this kind of behavior is allowed for some, it can happen to others — and those others could be American citizens. That is not some alarmist critic writing an op-ed; it’s the jurisprudence of a serious judge based on current filings and evidence, accessing what Trump actually says and does, rather than ignoring his literal statements as many of his apologists have done.

And on Monday, Sotomayor’s warning appeared one step closer to becoming reality. From the Oval Office, Trump suggested seizing power to send American citizens to the notorious El Salvador prison. “We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals,” Trump said. “I’d like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country.”