Trump says he ‘could’ bring Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador, but won’t

President Donald Trump on Tuesday acknowledged that he could secure the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month but refuses to do so. The comments appear to contradict previous remarks made by him and his top aides who say the US does not have the ability to return Abrego Garcia because he is in the custody of a foreign government, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Trump administration must “facilitate” his return. “You could get him back. There’s a phone on this desk,” ABC News’ Terry Moran, said to Trump during an exclusive interview that aired Tuesday night. “I could,” Trump replied. Pointing to the phone, Moran said: “You could pick it up and with all the power of the presidency, you could call up the President of El Salvador and say, ‘Send him back.’” “And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that,” the president added. “But he is not.” “I’m not the one making this decision,” Trump said, adding that he says government lawyers do not want to help bring Abrego Garcia back to the US. The administration admitted in court last month that Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant, was deported because of an administrative error, ignoring a judge’s 2019 ruling that he couldn’t be sent back to his native El Salvador, where his life could be in danger. US officials, however, have since refused to return Abrego Garcia to the US, arguing they lack power to force El Salvador to do so. “That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us,” Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters earlier in April. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said in a recent meeting with Trump that his administration isn’t “very fond of releasing terrorists” detained in his country and vowed to keep Abrego Garcia in prison. Abrego Garcia entered the US illegally sometime around 2011, but an immigration judge in 2019 withheld his removal, citing concerns for his safety. That meant he could not be deported to El Salvador but could be deported to another country. A gang in his native country, the immigration judge found, had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.” US officials detained the father of three on March 12 and deported him after alleging that he was confirmed to be a member of MS-13 by a “reliable source.” The Trump administration has designated the MS-13 gang as a foreign terrorist organization. Abrego Garcia and his wife, however, dispute the claim he is part of the gang and at least one federal judge has voiced skepticism toward it. “This is a MS-13 gang member,” Trump again said in the ABC interview, citing Abrego Garcia’s tattooed hands which contain skulls covering their eyes, ears and mouth, which a police document described as “indicative of the Hispanic gang culture.” “He said he wasn’t a member of a gang. And then they looked on his knuckles, he had MS-13,” Trump said, claiming Abrego Garcia’s knuckles displayed the name of the gang. Moran responded that the Maryland man “had some tattoos that are interpreted that way” and that the numbers and letters were “photoshopped.” Trump repeatedly argued, however, in response that a photo that was posted on Truth Social of Abrego Garcia’s knuckles was not photoshopped, while criticizing the ABC News journalist, telling Moran at one point, “No, no. He had MS as clear as you can be, not interpreted.” The online photo displayed Abrego Garcia’s tattooed knuckles with the letters and numbers of the gang above each tattoo and was altered to show the correlation of each tattoo to what the Trump administration says relates him to the name of the gang. Gang experts who spoke with CNN, however, say the tattoos alone are not proof of membership in MS-13. “I see a bunch of symbols that could be interpreted any number of ways,” Jorja Leap, a University of California, Los Angeles professor who has served as an expert gang witness in court, told CNN. “There is nothing in those tattoos that is definitively gang representative.” While some gangs will opt for more low-profile or ambiguous means of identification to evade detection from law enforcement or rival gang members, MS-13 tattoos, according to Leap, aren’t exactly subtle. They are used to market the gang’s brutality. “MS-13 members have tattoos that say ‘MS-13,’” Leap said. “They’re not head-scratchers; they’re billboards. There’s no ambiguity.” The judge overseeing Abrego Garcia’s case said last Tuesday that the Trump administration was not acting in “good faith” and accused officials of intentional noncompliance with their obligation to produce information. Government releases another protective order filed by his wife The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday shared a previously unpublicized request for a protective order filed by the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. It marks the second time the government has publicized documents pertaining to allegations of domestic violence against Abrego Garcia. His wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, objected to the government’s decision to make paperwork related to the first alleged incident public, saying the couple’s personal issues did not justify her husband’s wrongful deportation. Abrego Garcia’s wife describes him taking her phone and slapping her during an argument in August 2020, according to the petition. She also describes him breaking her phone and acting violently with police officers who responded to their home in Temple Hills, Maryland. “If the government is so convinced that they’ve got him dead to rights, that they’ve got all this evidence against him, bring him back and put him on trial,” Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, an attorney for Abrego Garcia, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on “OutFront” when asked on Wednesday about the petition. “And then he’ll take the witness stand and he’ll get to speak for himself and he’ll get to respond to all these allegations.” CNN has reached out to representatives for Vasquez Sura for comment on the second document requesting a protective order and its release by the government. Abrego Garcia was not charged with a crime connected with incidents described in either protective order request. About a week after she filed the request, Vasquez Sura filed another petition to rescind it, saying she wanted the family to be together for their son’s first birthday and that Abrego Garcia had agreed to attend counseling. The release of the court document by DHS represents the latest effort by the Trump administration to portray Abrego Garcia as violent and justify his removal to El Salvador – despite a judge’s 2019 order that prohibited his deportation to that country. The government previously released a different request for a protective order filed by Vasquez Sura, which detailed a 2021 incident in which she described her husband leaving bruises on her and saying she was “(afraid) to be close to him.” A judge in that case granted a six-week temporary order of protection, but the matter was dropped after Vasquez Sura did not appear at a court hearing. After the government earlier this month publicized the 2021 allegations, Vasquez Sura acknowledged the couple had had issues, but said she sought the protective order out of an abundance of caution after she was involved in a different relationship that involved domestic violence. She said she dropped the matter after “things did not escalate.” She also said in that statement the couple’s issues did not justify Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador. In the document released by the government Wednesday, Vasquez Sura described other incidents in which she alleged her husband had acted violently: She said Abrego Garcia grabbed her by the hair in November 2019; grabbed her by the hair and dragged her out of a car in December 2019, “leaving me in the street;” broke her son’s tablet and doors in their house in January 2020; pushed her against a wall in March 2020; and hit and broke a phone, TV and walls in May 2020. She also said Abrego Garcia told her ex-mother-in-law that even if “he kills me, no one can do anything to him,” according to the petition. In a constantly evolving stream of accusations, the Trump administration has painted Abrego Garcia as both a gang member and a violent husband. But the allegations publicized by the government aren’t related to his immigration case, or a judge’s 2019 order that prohibited his removal to El Salvador. This story has been updated to including additional developments and information from Trump’s interview. CNN’s Devan Cole, Shania Shelton and Michael Williams contributed to this report.