Trump says Salvadoran president 'doing a fantastic job' ahead of White House meeting
President Donald Trump is scheduled on Monday to host El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, for a bilateral meeting at the White House.
Trump early on Sunday told reporters he thought Bukele was doing a "fantastic job" and "taking care of a lot of problems that we have that we really wouldn't be able to take care of from a cost standpoint."
As the second Trump administration has cracked down on immigration, El Salvador has accepted into its custody hundreds of alleged gang members. Many are housed in the country's Terrorism Confinement Center, a maximum-security facility for El Salvador's most hardened criminals.
"We have some very bad people in that prison, people that should have never been allowed into our country, people that murder drug dealers, some of the worst people on Earth are in that prison and he's able to do that," Trump said on Sunday.
At least one man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported due to an "administrative error" and is being held at that notorious prison.
DOJ says federal courts can't direct Trump admin to conduct foreign relations
Federal courts have no authority to direct the executive branch to conduct foreign relations or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given matter, the Department of Justice said on Sunday in response to a motion for relief by attorneys for Kilmer Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was deported to El Salvador.
"Plaintiffs' additional relief runs headlong through this constitutional limit," said attorneys for the Department of Justice in a filing. "They ask this Court to order Defendants to make demands of the El Salvadoran government, dispatch personnel onto the soil of an independent, sovereign nation and send an aircraft into the airspace of a sovereign foreign nation to extract a citizen of that nation from its custody."
The requests by Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, the DOJ said, involve "interactions with a foreign sovereign -- and potential violations of that sovereignty."
"Plaintiffs invite this Court to 'exceed' its own 'authority' in the precise sort of way the Supreme Court cautioned against," DOJ added.
-ABC News' Laura Romero