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WSJ Editorial Board:
“… In any event, the Administration can appeal whatever ruling Judge Boasberg hands down, and the case will go up the appellate chain, perhaps as far as the Supreme Court. What the Administration can’t do is defy a court order without being lawless itself.
Also troubling is the U.S. reliance on Mr. Bukele, the Salvadoran president who has trampled due process in his war against crime. Gang violence is down and he’s popular, but his methods border on the barbaric. The country was desperate, but Mr. Bukele has destroyed independent legal institutions rather than restore the rule of law.
The U.S. is paying Mr. Bukele $6 million to handle the 300 gang members, and Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have praised him as if he’s an American hero. “We will not forget!” Mr. Trump declared.
As our Mary O’Grady has reported, Mr. Bukele gave 60,000 “tourist” visas to Ecuadorans and 32,000 to Indians in 2023 to enter his country. The migrants then paid cartels to take them to the American border. That contributed to the Biden-era migrant surge.
It isn’t clear why Mr. Trump had to get in a prison bed with Mr. Bukele when he could have sent the gang members to Guantanamo for immigration hearings and American due process. …”
BACKGROUND on BuKELE:
GIFT LINK —> https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-f...df?st=AU4p7t&reflink=mobilewebshare_permalink
“… In February 2020, less than a year after he took office, Mr. Bukele brought soldiers in battle gear with assault rifles into the Legislative Assembly to intimidate opposition parties when they challenged an executive loan proposal. In May 2021, immediately after his party won control of the legislature, he fired and forcibly removed the Constitutional Court and replaced it with his own handpicked judges.
In 2022 he declared a “state of exception,” suspending civil liberties, due process and oversight of budgets and public contracts. Three years later democratic norms remain suspended, the fisc is a black box, and a new law makes media investigations not approved by the state punishable by a fine or jail time. For Bukele political opponents, silence is survival.
There have been arrest quotas and police carry out personal vendettas. Most of the detained never learn what they’re accused of or the identity of their accusers. Under the law up to 900 people can be convicted in a single trial.
Some 8,000 Bukele prisoners have been released after captivity of as much as a year because they were so obviously innocent that their cases embarrassed the regime. Their stories are gruesome.
A 2023 State Department human-rights report on El Salvador found “credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention” and “serious problems with the independence of the judiciary.”
This could be Cuba. Yet Mr. Rubio called Mr. Bukele’s offer to house U.S. convicts in his dungeons “extraordinary.” …”


