Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg expressed his dismay at President Donald Trump's meeting with El Salvador's president Monday, in which both men proclaimed that they would not be returning a wrongly deported man back to the U.S.
Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, the self-described "world's coolest dictator," told the press corps Monday that he would not return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongly sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
“How can I return him to the United States? Am I going to smuggle him? Of course I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said during an Oval Office meeting with Trump.
"Look, El Salvador is essentially a contractor of the United States; they are taking money to put up a prison," Goldberg said during a panel discussion on CNN's Inside Politics. "In principle, I actually have no real problem with that."
Goldberg said that the problem for him was that an American-owned prison — even in El Salvador — was under the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.
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Goldberg continued, "I think that's the real reason why they don't want to return this guy — I think they don't care about the political headache of one man. The problem is, if they concede the point that they can ask for him to be sent back and they send them back, that means they can ask for all of them to be sent back, which is the thing they never want to concede in court.
Goldberg said that the Trump administration was "stonewalling" on the Garcia case "so that they can proceed with this much larger project."
"What I don't understand about any of this is that — well, first of all, why they didn't just do the proper process — Immigration judges...work for the president of the United States," Goldberg continued. "There's a process at the Justice Department where they could have actually had the order rescinded. They just didn't want to do it because it wasn't manly enough or something."
Watch the clip below or at this link.