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Trump Welcomes El Salvadoran President To White House; Bukele: I Can Return A Terrorist To The U.S.; Trump Says He Wants To Deport Homegrown Criminals To El Salvador. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired April 14, 2025 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[12:00:00]

NAYIB BUKELE, PRESIDENT OF EL SALVADOR: You're not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right?

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: It's always CNN.

BUKELE: How can I smuggle -- how can I return him to the United States? It's like I smuggle him into the United States or what do I do? Of course, I'm going to do it. It's like, I mean, the question is preposterous. How can I smuggle the terrorist into the United States? I don't have the power to return him to the United States.

REPORTER: But you can release him inside El Salvador.

BUKELE: Yeah, but I'm not releasing -- I mean, we're not very fond of releasing terrorists to our country. We just turned the murder capital of the world to the safest country of the Western Hemisphere. And you want us to go back into the releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world? Now that's not going to happen.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Well, they'd love to have a criminal you know into --

BUKELE: I mean there's a fascination.

TRUMP: They would love it.

BUKELE: Yeah.

TRUMP: They're sick. These are sick people. Marco, do you have something to say?

MARCO RUBIO, UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF STATE: Yeah, I mean Steve and I (inaudible), I don't understand what the confusion is. This individual is a citizen of El Salvador. He was illegally in the United States and was returned to his country. That's where you deport people, back to their country of origin, except for Venezuela that was refusing to take people back, or places like that.

I can tell you this, Mr. President, no -- the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the President of the United States, not by a court, and no court in the United States has a right to conduct a foreign policy of the United States. It's that simple, end of story.

STEPHEN MILLER, UNITED STATES HOMELAND SECURITY ADVISOR: And that's what the Supreme Court held, by the way. The Supreme Court said exactly what Marco said that no court has the authority to compel the foreign policy function of United States. We won a case nine-zero, and people like CNN are portraying it as a loss as usual, because they want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children. But President Trump, his policy is foreign terrorists that are here illegal to get expelled from the country, which, by the way, is a 90- 10 issue.

REPORTER: Well, the President -- Mr. President, you said that if the Supreme Court said someone needed to be returned, that you would abide by that. You said that on Air Force One just a few days ago, and they said it must be facilitated.

TRUMP: Why don't you just say, isn't it wonderful that we're keeping criminals out of our country? Why can't you just say that? Why do you go over and over, and that's why nobody watches you anymore. You know you have no credibility. Please go ahead.

REPORTER: President Trump, thank you very much. How many illegal criminals are you planning on exporting to El Salvador and President Bukele, how many are you willing to take from the U.S.?

TRUMP: As many as possible. And I just asked the President, you know there's this massive complex that he built, jail complex. I said, can you build some more of them, please? As many as we can get out of our country that were allowed in here by incompetent Joe Biden, through open borders, open borders.

You probably hear open borders and you can't even understand it because nobody can understand. Nobody smart or with common sense can understand it. So we have millions of people that should not be in this country, that are dangerous, not just people, because we have people, but we have millions of people that are murderers, drug dealers. They've been allowed to come into our country by other countries that were very smart.

When they heard that this very low IQ president -- and by the way, I took my cognitive exam as part of my physical exam, and I got the highest mark, and one of the doctors said, Sir, I've never seen anybody get that kind of -- that was the highest mark. I hope you're happy with that, although they haven't been bugging me too much to take a cognitive, but I did do my physical, and it was released.

I hope you're all happy with it. I notice there's no question. So probably you are. But the cognitive, they said to me, sir, would you like to take a cognitive test? I said, did Biden take one? No. Did anybody take one? No, not too many people took them. I said, what about -- what about Obama? Did he take one? No, he didn't take one either. I said, let me be the only one to take one.

But I've actually taken them three times already. I like taking them because they're sort of -- they're not too tough for me to take. But we had a great physical exam. So I know you're going to ask that. And the doctors, who are total professionals at Walter Reed Medical Center, the great, great people and I visited a soldier that was a badly wounded, incredible soldier, lost his leg, and we spent a lot of time with him.

I mean, great with his mother. And it was really a very great thing. They do a phenomenal job. I just want to say, Walter Reed, I was there for what, five-six hours. You were there with me, but I took a full physical, and it came out perfecto so it's great. She got me for a little longer.

REPORTER: Would you be willing to pay for those facilities to be open if new ones were going to be built?

TRUMP: I'd do something. We'd help them out. Yeah, we'd help them. They're great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don't play games. I'd like to go a step further. I mean, I say, I said it to Pam, I don't know what the laws are. We always have to obey the laws, but we also have home grown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking, that are absolute monsters. I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country. But you'll have to be looking at the laws on that state. OK?

[12:05:00]

REPORTER: (inaudible) and do you think more presidents should follow suit like you guys, as far as taking a hard stamp on crime in United States?

TRUMP: I do. I think everybody has to. The president said it better than anybody. He said, you know, you have liberty, and you have to have liberty, but to have liberty, you're going to -- not everybody is going to be good. And you know, some are bad because they're sick, they're mentally deranged, they're bad.

Then you have to take them, if you're going to have a country, you're going to have to take those people out. And we've been doing that, but this was like an unforced error, they would call it, where we had people that may hate our country, or maybe they're just stupid people. I think they're probably stupid people more so.

They a lot of people said they did it for the vote, but I did better with Hispanic people than they did, because they always use Hispanic I did better. You people love me, so I saw my poll numbers in your country through the roof, right? 91 percent No, no, they -- some people think they do it for the vote, but they don't have to do it for the vote.

They cheat. You know, they're professional cheaters. That's about the only thing they do well. So we just have had a great relationship, and it's become bigger because of a strange thing that happened, you know, I came back. We had no war in Ukraine. We had no war with -- we had no October 7, Middle East problem. We had nothing. We had -- we had no inflation.

We didn't have the Afghanistan -- most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, the Afghanistan not withdrawing. Because I would have been at, you know, I was -- I had it all set to bring people out with dignity and pride. That was the worst, most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, Afghanistan. We didn't have any of that.

You wouldn't have had the war with Russia, Ukraine. You wouldn't have had the Middle East problem because Iran was broke. They had no money because we had secondary sanctions on and lots of other sanctions. And now every single thing. Got a problem with Iran, but I'll solve that problem. That's almost an easy one. We got to solve a war that should have never started, Ukraine and Russia, and we'll get that solved.

And we have to solve problems, and we already solved inflation. You look at the numbers, the numbers are incredible, actually. Stock market is up, and we're not letting other countries take advantage of this country like the half of the last 40 years. So thank you very much. You have a question, please?

REPORTER: Mr. President, thank you so much. Can you score another major investment win this morning when Nvidia pledged to build its A.I. supercomputer, the first time ever, right here in the United States?

TRUMP: That's a question I like. That's true.

REPORTER: What is your reaction to this announcement, sir, and how has this positively benefited Americans across the country?

TRUMP: Well, it's one of the biggest announcements you'll ever hear, because Nvidia, as you know, controls that almost the entire sector, which is one of the most important sectors in the world, between chips and semiconductors and everything else. And they're the biggest and the other biggest we already have coming in and spending $300 billion, as you know.

They announced two weeks ago, but Nvidia is so highly respected, and this was an announcement that a lot of people, I knew it was going to happen, but not to the extent that it happened. It's big, and the reason they did it is because of the election on November 5, and because of a thing called tariffs, as I said, the most beautiful word in the dictionary, after love, God, relationship.

The press actually hit me. I said, tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. What about family, love, God? I got hit even on that. You understand. I said, OK, so now I said, it's my fifth most favorite word, because they get you on anything. But no that Nvidia, it's -- it's one of the great companies of the world, modern, super modern companies controls segments that nobody -- you know sort of controls the world, in a sense.

And they're coming in here in the biggest way, with hundreds of billions of dollars, not -- not like millions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars, and I'm honored by it, and want to thank Jensen and all of the people that we deal with. They're great people, they're brilliant people, and without tariffs, they wouldn't be doing it. OK. Thank you very much. REPORTER: Are you considering additional sanctions against Russia after their latest attack. And do you have an update on the rate and when you might announce semiconductor tariffs?

TRUMP: We already have sanctions on Russia. I put them there. If you remember Nord Stream 2, that was -- that's the big pipeline that goes through Europe. I stopped it. That's Russia's pipeline. The largest pipeline, I think, in the world, goes to Germany. And I stopped it, and when Biden came in, he approved it.

[12:10:00]

And then they say, oh, I'm friendly with Russia. No, no. Putin said, you know, if you're my friend, I'd hate to see you when you're my enemy. I stopped the biggest -- the biggest economic job they ever had, I stopped it cold, right? It was dead, you know that, right. And Biden came in and he immediately approved it. What was that all about?

And it's a pipeline that takes care of a lot of the needs. Now, you know, it was a very controversial thing, but I stopped it and Biden approved it. Question?

TRUMP: Not you.

REPORTER: (inaudible) on semiconductor tariffs and potentially pharmaceuticals.

TRUMP: What?

REPORTER: Semiconductor tariffs and potentially pharmaceuticals.

TRUMP: Pharmaceuticals, we're going to do. We have -- we don't make our own drugs, our own pharmaceuticals. We don't make our own drugs anymore. The drug companies are in Ireland, and they're in lots of other places, China. And all I have to do is impose a tariff. The more, the faster they move in. The higher the tariff -- it's very -- it's inversely proportional. The higher the tariff, the faster they come.

And yeah, we're going to be doing that. That's going to be like we have on cars. We have, as you know, a 25 percent tariff on cars. We have a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum, and that's what that category fits right now.

REPORTER: Do you have a percentage in mind or a timeline?

TRUMP: I have a timeline, yeah, not too distant future. We're doing it because we want to make our own drugs. We're doing it because we want to make our own steel and aluminum, lumber, other things, and they're all coming in. We have record numbers, $7 trillion since I announced, like a month and a half ago, since I came basically since I came in.

We have over $7 trillion being invested in the country. We didn't have 1 trillion. We didn't have a half a trillion dollars for some of these guys. They didn't know what the hell they were doing. So we have the largest investment that we've ever heard of, and we're only two months in, and that'll continue at levels that you've never seen before. It's going to happen, and even the stock market is up today. We also -- a lot of people didn't say it the way it was.

We had the largest gain in the stock market in history on every single category last week. That was a nice, nice game, because we get a little hit because people didn't understand the power of our economic -- our country economically, if you use it right. Do you have something to say, JD?

J.D. VANCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES: Yes, sir. I mean, look, for 40 years we have lost manufacturing capacity. Workers have seen their wages stagnate and some of the most critical things that we need from the pharmaceuticals, the drugs that we give to our children, the antibiotics that we give to our kids, to the weapons that we actually need to fight a war, if God forbid, we had to fight a war, we don't make enough of that stuff.

And so President Trump ran explicitly on changing that. Yes, as the President mentioned, it caused a little bit of disruption in the market. But I actually think over the long term, workers are going to benefit. Stocks are going to go up. American businesses are going to benefit as we reinvest and reindustrialize our country.

TRUMP: And the auto workers and the Teamsters and all of the unions, you know, not traditionally Republican, but I'm winning those unions by what, 40-50 points on the Democrats. They're losing everything. They're losing everything because they just have policies that are not believable. They have -- they fight for policies that are 5 percent popular, and nobody knows who the 5 percent are. I mean, nobody can find the 5 percent.

But if you go back to Ohio, and by the way, we have the great championship team from Ohio coming in today, right?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Very big day.

TRUMP: And that's going to be a little bit later, but, and that'll be -- if you want to stick around, we'll appreciate it. You'll see some very large people, right? You see some people that even you have not seen. These are big. These are six foot, seven, 380 pounds, with no fat. OK, that's pretty good. But the team, the national championship team, is being honored today at the White House, so that'll be exciting.

(inaudible) want to stay around, I'll have you up there. You can tell them all about your prison, how you have to behave -- OK. Who else?

REPORTER: You said yesterday that you're making a decision on Iran very quickly. What do you mean by that? Is that a decision to strike Iran?

TRUMP: We're going to solve the problem very quickly. Iran wants to deal with us, but they don't know how. They really don't know how. We had a meeting with them on Saturday. We have another meeting scheduled next Saturday. I said, that's a long time. You know, that's a long time, so I think they might be tapping us along.

[12:15:00]

But Iran has to get rid of the concept of a nuclear weapon. They cannot have a nuclear weapon. He can't have a nuclear weapon. Nobody can have. We can't have anybody having nuclear weapons. You know, you can't have nuclear weapons, and I think they're tapping us along, because they were so used to dealing with stupid people in this country.

And I had Iran perfect. You had no attacks. You would have never had October 7th in Israel, the attack by Hamas, because Iran was broke. They were stone cold broke when I was president. And I don't want to do -- I want them to be a rich, great nation. The only thing is one thing, simple. It's really simple. They can't have a nuclear weapon, and they got to go fast, because they're fairly close to having one, and they're not going to have one.

And if we have to do something very harsh, we'll do it. And I'm not doing it for us, I'm doing it for the world, and these are radicalized people, and they cannot have a nuclear weapon.

REPORTER: Does that include a potential strike on Iranian nuclear facilities?

TRUMP: Of course, it does.

REPORTER: Just a follow up question or clarification. You mentioned that you're open to deporting individuals that aren't foreign aliens, but criminals to El Salvador. Does that -- does that include potentially, U.S. citizens, fully naturalized Americans?

TRUMP: If they're criminals and if they hit people with baseball bats over their head, that happened to be 90 years old. And if -- if they rape 87-year old women in Coney Island, Brooklyn, yeah, that includes them. Why do you think there's special category of prison? They're as bad as anybody that comes in. We have bad ones too, and I'm all for it, because we can do things with the president for less money and have great security.

And we have a huge prison population. We have a huge number of prisons, and then we have the private prisons. And some are operated well, I guess, and some aren't, but he does a great job with that. We have others that we're negotiating with too, but no, if it's -- if it's -- if it's a home grown criminal, I have no problem. Now, we're studying the laws right now. Pam is studying, if we can do that, that's good.

And I'm talking about violent people. I'm talking about really bad people, really bad people, every bit as bad as the ones coming in. And I made the statement when I heard about this a long time ago, now, four years ago, when I heard that this guy was having open borders, I said, every single criminal from all over the world is going to be dumped into our country. And that's what happened.

Jails, the jails of the Congo were emptied out. The jails of Venezuela were emptied out. And you know what happened? Their crime went way down. But now Venezuela has other countries -- problems. You know what the problem is, they have no money because I shut off their oil and we put secondary tariffs because they're not -- they're not doing what's right over there.

They know what to do. We spoke to them. I spoke to them. They know what to do, but they have no money. Venezuela has no money, but Iran had no money, and Iran behaved so beautifully. And then Biden took all those secondary tariffs on tariffs on. I told China you can't buy oil. If you buy oil from Iran, China, I told it to President Xi, then we no longer want you to do business with the United States of America. And those ships disappeared from that harbor so quickly.

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: OK. We have been listening to a lengthy live press conference inside the Oval Office with the leader of El Salvador, Bukele, where we have heard a lot of bits of information, a lot of news nuggets that we want to definitely focus on, a lot of -- some misinformation as well.

But we want to digest all of this right now with our terrific panel here and our reporters. Jeff Zeleny, I want to start with you. You were at the White House. Before I get to you, I just want to say for the record, since we heard President Trump say in the Oval Office that CNN hates our country, CNN does not hate our country. That should go without saying. I've been here for 32 years, and I see a rhetorical device in him trying to say such a thing.

That said, I want to focus on the news that we heard, and that news came out in several ways, on several fronts, all relating to what is happening with regard to this prison in El Salvador. Jeff, let me start with you. You tell us what you thought the top headlines were.

[12:20:00]

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Dana, some major news, there's no doubt about it. I mean, hanging over this meeting was the question of, would the Maryland man who has been wrongfully deported by the administration's own admission, they called it an administrative error swept up into a variety of arrests of immigrants, who have ended up in El Salvador, in the prison?

That is the central part of the meeting here, he will not be returning to the United States. President Bukele said he does not have the power to return him. He said it would be akin to smuggling a terrorist into the United States. There had been some question if the release of this Maryland man, Mr. Garcia, would be effectuated, even though the Supreme Court has ruled that the administration should facilitate the release, the administration of -- very forcefully said that they would not.

The Attorney General, Pam Bondi spoke to this, as well as the President's top Immigration Adviser, Deputy White House Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, vociferously spoke about this in the Oval Office, saying that the court cannot interfere in their words, in a foreign affairs, foreign policy. Of course, the administration again acknowledged wrongfully sending someone to the prison in El Salvador. But again, the headline is that he will not be released. Then from

there, of course, as you said, Dana, significant misinformation. Ukraine, of course, is front and center. The administration has been talking about for weeks a cease-fire. The President's proposal for a cease-fire between a Russia and Ukraine clearly has not gone anywhere. The violence intensified over the weekend yet again, and just seeing the leaders sitting there in the Oval Office, I think, brings our minds back to the -- the meeting that -- that the Trump Administration, the President had with the Ukrainian president.

And that's been almost two months ago, and the cease-fire has gone absolutely nowhere. The President wrongfully suggested that Ukraine started the war. Of course, we all know that Russia invaded Ukraine and Vladimir Putin started the war, so that has been one of the many things that has not gone well for this administration trying to broker a peace fire. But I do think out of all of the things we heard in there, and it was a lot that the Maryland man will not be returning from President Bukele's famous prison in El Salvador. Dana?

BASH: Yes, absolutely that. And we're going to discuss here at the table, the door opening to people who are home grown terrorists, as he put it, meaning, sounds like he's saying, U.S. citizens, opening the door to U.S. citizens being sent to this prison in El Salvador. We obviously want to talk about that as well. Thank you so much, Jeff. Please let us know if we hear anything new from -- from the President as he continues to talk there.

My panel is here now, and I want to start with you, Priscilla, and talk about some of the news, but also just this -- this -- this scene in the Oval Office that Bukele is somebody who so gets Donald Trump. He obviously is -- either he's very much like Donald Trump, or he is -- has the emotional intelligence of sort of an Einstein, because he knew exactly what to say to please him. He knew exactly the sort of triggers, if you will, whether it was DEI or trans in sports or attacking the media.

PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Let's take a step back in time here, when President Trump won in November, the first thing I heard from multiple sources was keep an eye on El Salvador, and this Oval Office meeting is exactly why they were saying that. This has been built up over time. Administration officials knew that El Salvador would play ball with the Trump Administration, that they would be willing to do a lot for the administration when it came to his key signature issue, and that is, of course, immigration.

And the President himself said, there. It is his quote, best relationship. And because of that, you can see why this gets so complicated against the backdrop of the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his mistaken deportation to El Salvador. You heard there from the Attorney General that it's up to El Salvador if they want to return him. Then you heard the El Salvadoran President say, well, I don't have the power to do that.

And doing that would be smuggling in this man, total disregard for the opportunity for two governments to work together to rectify what court documents have shown was a wrong by the administration themselves by the way, admitting to this wrong.

It's also what the courts and the federal judges have been saying over the last several weeks, which is this lack of desire by the administration to try to retrieve this man from this notorious mega prison. Now, in addition to all of this, though, the President was saying that he's willing to send and wants to send many more migrants to this notorious mega prison.

[12:25:00]

There was a moment there where they were boasting about security, and who has the better security, the United States or El Salvador. The President quite keen on what's happening in El Salvador, even going so far as to say he wants more facilities there to hold migrants, including, he didn't seem to -- or he seemed to suggest, to be open to U.S. citizens being down there. All of this, by the way, down, as I'm also talking to my sources, has been talked about behind the scenes.

Administration officials open to sending more people there, opening up more facilities there, some of those proposals, by the way, coming from private military contractors who want to be part of this.

BASH: And I think again, taking a step back, what you saw was a hot potato being passed in the Oval Office. Because, on the one hand, you have the Attorney General before this meeting saying, well, we could send a plane down to -- to get this Maryland man. And then you have Stephen Miller saying, well -- and also the Secretary of State saying, why would we do that? He's not from here. He's from El Salvador.

And then, of course, as you mentioned, the Salvadoran leader saying something completely different, and this notion that, as you kind of alluded to Priscilla, that these two leaders can't just sit down and work it out. They obviously can. They don't want to.

JONAH GOLDBERG, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Right. Yeah, so, I mean, I think that's the key point is -- it's -- look, El Salvador is essentially a contractor of the United States. They are taking money to put up a prison. In principle, I actually have no real problem with that. The problem with it for them is that if it's an American facility, even by proxy, it is open to the jurisdiction of American courts. And I think that's the real reason why they don't want to return this guy.

I think they don't care about the political headache of one man. The problem is if they concede the point that they can ask for him to be sent back, and they send him back, that means they can ask for all of them to be sent back, which is the thing they never want to concede in court. And so they're stonewalling on this one guy so that they can proceed with this much larger project. What I don't understand about any of this is that, well, first of all, why they didn't just do the proper process.

Immigration judges are Article Two judges. They work for the President of the United States. There's a process at the Justice Department where they could have actually had the order rescinded. They just didn't want to do it because it wasn't manly enough or something. But secondly is like, if you have Erik Prince doing this stuff, and you're setting up American owned or contracted out prisons in El Salvador. They are American facilities subject to American law and American courts' jurisdiction, so I don't understand what problem they think they're solving there.

BASH: I stand by. I want to go to Kaitlan Collins. Kaitlan, you were there. You were asking some of the questions of the President, and tried to ask a question of the Salvadoran leader, what were your takeaways?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I mean, essentially, they are making very clear that this Maryland man who was by the own Justice Department's acknowledgement, mistakenly deported to El Salvador recent -- in recent weeks, that he will not be returned to the United States. That was the argument that the President was making as they were offering their own interpretation of that Supreme Court filing that said that the administration must facilitate Abrego Garcia's return to the United States.

And they were essentially arguing that that was not the case, that then the courts would be trying to intervene in foreign policy, which is strictly in the purview of the President of the United States. And Stephen Miller, who of course, is one of the President's top advisers, was there standing next to me inside the Oval Office, and was saying that that is essentially a question that is better positioned to the President of El Salvador.

I then asked President Bukele his interpretation of that, and he essentially likened it to smuggling a terrorist back into the United States, if he returned this man who was mistakenly deported to his country and is still being held there, based on a filing that we saw over this weekend, and so he was essentially scoffing at the idea of returning him. And so I think one thing coming out of that was clear, as we're in the middle of this huge court fight between this man's attorneys and the White House and the Justice Department on this is that they do not plan to ask the president of El Salvador to return this man or to help facilitate his return as he's being held in that notorious mega prison in El Salvador.

And so you heard the administration's argument. Obviously, that is something that is going to come up in court filings coming out of this, because they have said, by their own acknowledgement, that it was an administrative error that he was deported to El Salvador after being granted protection in 2019, here in the United States by an immigration judge essentially saying, out of fear of persecution, that he could not be sent back to El Salvador.

And so certainly a hard line stance that we just saw coming out of the Oval Office on this which is notable Dana, because just a few days ago, on Air Force One after that Supreme Court ruling came out that had some confusion in it.