The New York Times reports:

As they addressed reporters inside the Oval Office in mid-April, President Trump and his Salvadoran counterpart appeared to be operating in lock step.

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. He scoffed at a question from a reporter about whether he would release one of the men who a federal judge said had been mistakenly deported.

“I mean, we’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country,” Mr. Bukele said.

But weeks earlier, when the three planes of deportees landed, it was the Salvadoran president who had quietly expressed concerns.

As part of the agreement with the Trump administration, Mr. 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.

Mr. Bukele wanted assurances from the United States that each of those locked up in the prison was members of Tren de Aragua, the transnational gang with roots in Venezuela, according to people familiar with the situation and documents obtained by The New York Times.

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.

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 New York Times pieced together the most complete account yet of the U.S. arrangement with El Salvador and the March 15 deportations from internal government documents, court filings and interviews with 22 people familiar with the operation or legal challenges, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.

For months, aides to Mr. Trump had worked to engineer a new system to deport immigrants rapidly to Central and South America, with little to no oversight from the courts. The strategy hinged on using an 18th-century wartime law and treating the migrants like citizens of a country at war with the United States.

But the application of the rarely used Alien Enemies Act appeared to be haphazard, pulling in migrants whose relatives insisted they were not gang members. Government officials hurried to assemble documents detailing who was sent to the prison and justify the deportations in court. The process was so messy that eight women were among those flown to be incarcerated in the Salvadoran prison, an all-male facility, and had to be swiftly returned.

Friends and families of the men locked up in El Salvador are now struggling to extract information about their fate. The White House is in a standoff with the federal courts over how it has applied the Alien Enemies Act, with the Supreme Court expected to weigh in soon, a potentially significant test of Mr. Trump’s attempts to expand his executive power. [Continue reading…]