El Salvador President Nayib Bukele told reporters during a meeting with President Donald Trump today that he would not return a man the Justice Department said it mistakenly deported to his country.

“How can I return him to the United States? Like if I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous,” Bukele said, sitting beside Trump in the Oval Office, when asked if he’d return Kilmar Abrego Garcia. “We’re not very fond of releasing terrorists,” he added.

Trump then turned to Bukele and said of the assembled reporters: “They’d love to have a criminal released into our country. These are sick people.”

He also said he wants Bukele to take in as many criminals “as possible.”

Garcia has never been charged criminally in the U.S. or El Salvador, according to court filings.

Justice Department officials have acknowledged that Garcia should not have been sent to El Salvador because of an immigration judge’s 2019 order barring him from being sent there, and the Supreme Court has called his removal illegal and directed the administration to “facilitate” his return while being respectful of the president’s authority.

In the Oval Office meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he didn’t understand “the confusion” over the order, arguing “the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the president of the United States, not by a court, and no court in the United States has a right to conduct a foreign policy of the United States.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “If they want to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane. That’s up for El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us.”

The exchanges came shortly after top White House adviser Stephen Miller told Fox News that Garcia was “sent to the right place.”

“He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador,” Miller said, pushing back on the Justice Department’s repeated assertions in numerous court filings that Garcia was sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison last month because of “an administrative error.”

“This was the right person sent to the right place,” Miller said, despite the Supreme Court’s criticism of the removal in a ruling last week.

“The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal,” the high court found, noting that the Justice Department acknowledged the removal was the result of an “administrative error.”

He said if Bukele were to return Garcia, “he would be deported the second time to El Salvador.”

Kilmar Abrego Garcia. CASA via AP

The Trump administration struck a $6 million deal with El Salvador to imprison deportees it says are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and members of the street gang MS-13. The administration has labeled both gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.

An immigration judge in 2019 found Garcia to be affiliated with MS-13, an allegation he denies.

The federal judge presiding over the case seeking his return to the U.S., Paula Xinis, noted that Garcia has no criminal record in the U.S. or in El Salvador, and said the gang membership charge came from “a singular unsubstantiated allegation.”

“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived,” the judge found.

In his interview with Fox, Miller said Garcia’s membership in MS-13 meant that the order barring him from being returned to El Salvador was null and void, a position the government has not taken in court.

Xinis, in a ruling backed by the Supreme Court, directed the administration to “facilitate” Garcia’s return, which Miller said he takes to mean that the U.S. would allow him to return of El Salvador decided to send him back.

He also said the government’s acknowledgment it made a mistake came from “a DOJ lawyer who has since been relieved of duty, a saboteur, a Democrat,” but the attorney he was referring to was not the only one to make that representation. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer referred to the removal as an “administrative error” in a filing to the Supreme Court last week.

Guards lead a man Jennifer Vasquez Sura identified as her husband, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, through the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador.U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland via AP

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