El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele was skeptical that the deportees being flown from the U.S. to his notoriously rough Cecot prison were actually members of the violent Tren de Aragua gang, according to new reporting in The New York Times.
And a demand he issued in exchange for taking the men triggered panic in the U.S. as it threatened to blow up a claim made by the Department of Justice, the report added.
Bukele flew to Washington, D.C. last month for an Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump, during which both men claimed that they had no power to return a mistakenly deported Maryland man, whom Trump asserted was a criminal but who received no Constitutional due process before being shipped out.
"The United States had just deported more than 200 migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, and President Nayib Bukele said his country was eager to take more" at the time of the meeting, the Times reported.
But weeks earlier, when the Trump administration defied a judge's order to turn around the planes full of deportees, "it was the Salvadoran president who had quietly expressed concerns," the reporters wrote.
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Bukele had agreed to house "only what he called 'convicted criminals' in the prison. However, many of the Venezuelan men labeled gang members and terrorists by the U.S. government had not been tried in court," the report said.
"The matter was urgent, a senior U.S. official warned his colleagues shortly after the deportations, kicking off a scramble to get the Salvadorans whatever evidence they could," according to the Times.
"Mr. Bukele’s demands for more information about some of the deportees, which has not been previously reported, deepen questions about whether the Trump administration sufficiently assessed who it dispatched to a foreign prison," the report said.
Bukele allegedly demanded a list of "high-ranking MS-13 gang leaders he wanted sent back to El Salvador as part of the deal," but that "stoked alarm among some U.S. law enforcement officials" since the Justice Department alleged for years "that the gang has been protected by the Salvadoran government."
The Times reported that Bukele has denied the claims, and a spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
