WASHINGTON — A US judge pressed a government lawyer on Wednesday (May 7) on whether Republican President Donald Trump was telling the truth when he said he could secure the return of wrongly deported migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia with a phone call to El Salvador's president.

Washington DC-based US District Judge James Boasberg asked the question of Justice Department lawyer Abhishek Kambli at a hearing in a different case, in which the government is arguing it cannot obtain custody of some 137 Venezuelan migrants being held in a Salvadoran mega-prison after being deported under an 18th-century wartime law.

"Didn't the president say just last week that he could secure the return of Mr Abrego Garcia simply by picking up the phone and asking the president of El Salvador to release him?" Boasberg said, referring to Trump's comments in an April 30 ABC News interview. "So is the President not telling the truth?"

Kambli said that the US having influence over the migrants' potential release did not mean they were in US custody.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is representing the Venezuelans, has asked Boasberg to order Trump to facilitate their return because they were not given an adequate chance to challenge their deportations under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.

The case is one of the primary legal challenges to Trump's aggressive immigration policies, which critics say are violating migrants' constitutional rights.

Boasberg did not immediately rule on the ACLU's request, but said the rights group had likely established that the US was still ultimately responsible for their incarceration despite them being held in El Salvador. They are being held in the Central American country's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in a deal in which Washington is paying San Salvador US$6 million (S$8 million).

The judge asked Kambli about other officials' statements that suggested El Salvador was holding the migrants at US behest, including White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt's confirmation of the US$6 million deal and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's assertion that CECOT was "one of the tools in our toolkit".

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Kambli said some public statements had lacked nuance.

"Is that another way of saying that a number of these statements just aren't true?" Boasberg said.

Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security immediately responded to requests for comment.

Accusations against Maduro refuted

Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act — best known for being used to intern and deport people of Japanese, German and Italian descent during World War Two — on March 15 to speed up the deportations of alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

Relatives of many of the men deported under the act and their lawyers deny gang membership.

In invoking the act, Trump said the gang was "conducting irregular warfare" against the US at the direction of socialist Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Venezuela says Tren de Aragua was effectively wiped out in 2023, and that the idea that it still exists is based on a claim from the country's political opposition, calling it a "massive lie".

The US intelligence community has concluded that Maduro's government "is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States," according to an April 7 memorandum from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation under a public records request.

A different federal judge has also ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return. So far, the Trump administration has not given any indication it has asked El Salvador's government to return Abrego Garcia.

Source: Reuters