WASHINGTON

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele ruled out Monday returning a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to his country by the Trump administration last month.

"How can I return him to the United States? Should I smuggle him to the United States? Or what do I do? Of course, I'm not going to do it. 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 told reporters as he sat down with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

Bukele ruled out releasing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man imprisoned in a notorious Salvadoran prison since March after being mistakenly deported by the Trump administration.

"We're not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. We just turned the murder capital of the world to the safest country in the Western hemisphere. And you want us to go back into the releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world? That's not going to happen," he added.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said if El Salvador were to want to return Abrego Garcia "we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane."

The comments appear to be a response to a ruling from the Supreme Court on Friday in which the Trump administration was instructed to "facilitate" Abrego Garcia's return to the US.

Garcia, 29, was deported to his native country on March 15 along with hundreds of other alleged Salvadoran and Venezuelan gang members, even though a previous court order from a separate case barred him from being removed from the US.

The Department of Justice admitted that it made an error in deporting Abrego Garcia but claimed it did not have the authority to bring him back because he was now in the custody of another country.

After a series of legal wranglings in federal court, the nation's highest court stepped in last week and ordered the Trump administration to give details on Garcia's status to have him returned to the US.

The Justice Department announced its defiance of the court system on Sunday.

"The federal courts have no authority to direct the Executive Branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner," said DOJ attorneys in a court filing, arguing that officials only have a duty to "remove any domestic obstacles" that may stand in the way of Garcia's return.