"'You could get him back, there’s a phone on this desk,' said Terry Moran, an ABC News correspondent.... 'I could,' Mr. Trump replied."

"Mr. Moran said Mr. Trump could call President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and get Mr. Abrego Garcia back immediately. 'And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that,' Mr. Trump said. 'But he is not.' Mr. Trump added that government lawyers do not want to help bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States. Mr. Trump’s comments not only undermined previous statements by his top aides, but were a blunt sign of his administration’s intention to double down and defy the courts.... Mr. Trump also told ABC News his administration was right to send Mr. Abrego Garcia to a prison in El Salvador designed for terrorists... despite various government officials previously saying in court that the deportation was an 'administrative error.'... 'This is a MS-13 gang member,' Mr. Trump said during the interview...."

The NYT reports.

"I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that includes the repatriation of 100 percent of the 252 Venezuelans who were deported, in exchange for the release and surrender of an identical number (252) of the thousands of political prisoners you hold."

Wrote El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, on X, addressing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, quoted in the NYT.

Among the political prisoners in Venezuela named in Mr. Bukele’s post were several people detained by the Maduro government in a crackdown last year. He also said that as part of the swap, he would require Mr. Maduro to release “nearly 50 detained citizens of other nationalities,” including Americans. As of last month, at least 68 foreign passport holders were wrongfully imprisoned in Venezuela, according to a Venezuelan watchdog group, Foro Penal.... 

“Unlike you, who holds political prisoners,” Mr. Bukele wrote, “we do not have political prisoners. All the Venezuelans we have in custody were detained as part of an operation against gangs like Tren de Aragua in the United States.” 

"Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture,’ now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador."

"Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody."

Said El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, quoted in "Alleged MS-13 gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia seen ‘sipping margaritas’ with Sen. Van Hollen amid El Salvador deportation battle, new photos reveal" (NY Post).

"Miraculously risen" — somehow, we get Easter joke to take us into Easter weekend. 

"The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States."

"I mean, we’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. We just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere and you want us to go back into releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world? That’s not going to happen."

Said El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, quoted in "El Salvador President Nayib Bukele says he won’t return Abrego Garcia to U.S." (CNBC).

The Supreme Court — in Noem v. Abrego Garcia — obligated the Trump administration to "facilitate and effectuate" returning Abrego Garcia to the United States and sent the case back to the district court to "clarify" the meaning of "effectuate" and to do so with "the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs."

"Migrants deported from the US, and even 'dangerous' American citizens convicted of heinous crimes could be headed to a notorious hellhole prison in El Salvador..."

"After a meeting between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in San Salvador on Monday, Rubio announced that the [Terrorism Confinement Center] could begin accepting inmates from the US.... The inmates are... crammed into their cells for 23.5 hours a day, with each cell holding 65 to 70 prisoners. Rival gang members are often kept in the same cells.... The mega-prison is capable of holding 40,000 people, with Bukele offering to fill some of the vacancies with criminal migrants and convicted US citizens, for a fee...."

From "Inside El Salvador’s mega-prison where president has offered to hold ‘dangerous’ US citizens and criminal migrants" (NY Post).

Here's some video of Rubio:

"That's an offer President Bukele made. Obviously, we'll have to study at our end. There are obviously legalities involved. We have a Constitution. We have all sorts of things. But it's a very generous offer. No one's ever made an offer like that, and to outsource at a fraction of the cost, at least some of the most dangerous and violent criminals that we have in the United States...."

"Trump Administration Rules That Nearly 200,000 Salvadorans Must Leave, Officials Say."

The NYT reports.

The officials... said that the administration was ending a humanitarian program, known as Temporary Protected Status, for Salvadorans who have been allowed to live and work legally in the United States since a pair of devastating earthquakes struck their country in 2001....

[D]espite its name, the administration says, the Temporary Protected Status program had turned into a quasi-permanent benefit for hundreds of thousands of people.... It provides temporary lawful status and work authorization to people already in the United States, whether they entered legally or not, from countries affected by armed conflict, natural disaster or other strife....

In 2016, the final time [the protections were extended], the government cited several factors, including drought, poverty and widespread gang violence in El Salvador, as reasons to keep the protections in place.

"Did doctors in a country that bans abortion under any circumstances manage to terminate the pregnancy without violating the law?"

Yes, because there was a delivery through Caesarean section, and even though the baby died soon after, the motivation of the doctors was to save the woman's life, not to kill the baby.

Sidney Blanco, one of the high court judges who ruled against Beatriz, said that “if they intervene and only Beatriz survives” because the fetus could not be saved, then it could be that her doctors “were not committing any crime.”...

Beatriz said her doctors would have terminated her pregnancy regardless of what the [Salvadoran] high court ruled, expressing a confidence that they would value her life over that of an unviable fetus.

This is a very old moral principle. I've seen it in the context of discussions of doctor-assisted suicide, where the idea is that the doctor — though ethically prohibited from killing the patient — may give pain relief, even where the consequence of the medication will be that the patient dies, because the point is to relieve the pain and not to end the life.

Ah, yes, here it is:

The principle of double effect; also known as the rule of double effect; the doctrine of double effect, often abbreviated as DDE or PDE, double-effect reasoning; or simply double effect, is a set of ethical criteria which Christians, and some others, use for evaluating the permissibility of acting when one's otherwise legitimate act (for example, relieving a terminally ill patient's pain) will also cause an effect one would normally be obliged to avoid (for example, the patient's death). Double-effect originates in Thomas Aquinas's treatment of homicidal self-defense, in his work Summa Theologiae.

El Salvador's highest court rejects abortion for woman with lupus whose fetus is anencephalic.

"[I]n a 4-to-1 ruling, the court cited the country’s legal 'absolute impediment to authorize the practice of abortion,' and ruled that 'the rights of the mother cannot be privileged over those' of the fetus."

The court recognized that Beatriz has lupus, but it said that her disease was currently under control and that the threat to her life “is not actual or imminent, but rather eventual.” It ordered that her health continue to be closely monitored, saying that if complications arose that put her right to life in imminent danger doctors “could proceed with interventions.”

While abortion is banned, doctors are allowed to induce premature birth if the mother is facing imminent risk, possibly saving the life of the mother and the baby at the same time, according to José Miguel Fortín Magaña, director of the Institute of Legal Medicine, which advises the court on medical issues.

In the ruling, the court cited doctors as saying that “an eventual interruption of the pregnancy would not imply, much less have as an objective, the destruction of the fetus.”

Beatriz’s lawyer, however, described the ruling as “misogynistic” because it placed the rights of a fetus with little chance of surviving after birth over the welfare of a sick woman who already has an infant boy to care for. “The court placed the life of the anencephalic baby over Beatriz’s life,” said Víctor Hugo Mata, one of her lawyers, speaking by phone from the Supreme Court. “Justice here does not respect the rights of women.”

We could discuss whether the court in El Salvador is "misogynistic," but I would like to direct discussion toward how we — especially Americans — think about access to late-term abortion. Let's say Woman A has a health problem (like lupus) that makes pregnancy risky, but she chooses to go forward with the pregnancy, because she wants a child. Later, past the point of viability, a serious birth defect becomes apparent, and she assesses the risk differently. She wants to abort because of a combination of the health risk and the low value she puts on the specific unborn child she knows she is carrying. Woman B has no health problem, but she finds out, equally late in a pregnancy, that her child has the same birth defect. There are 3 moral positions available: 1. Neither woman should be permitted to have an abortion, 2. Both women should be permitted to have an abortion, and 3. Woman A must be permitted to have an abortion, but Woman B must be forbidden.

I think position #3 is hard to understand and suspect that those who are arguing for position #3 are setting up the argument for position #2. It seems that the supposed appeal of Beatriz's case is that her baby is relatively worthless, but if we are willing to mark some severely disabled human beings as low value, why shouldn't any woman be able to avoid the pains of late pregnancy and childbirth? That is, we move toward position #2. But if you commit to the right to life and say — like the right-to-life spokesperson at the link — that you must protect "all human beings however small, poor, vulnerable or defenseless," don't you have to go to position #1, at least until the point where the medical procedure to be performed is for the precise end of saving the woman's life and not aimed at destroying the child?

UPDATE: Following the court's opinion, doctors performed a Caesarean section, and the baby lived for 5 hours and died. That is, the child's personhood was respected, the woman's health needs were met, and the abortion-rights demagoguery became more obvious.

Pedro de Alvarado "named the district for El Salvador ('The Savior') and was appointed its first governor..."

"... a position he held until his death in 1541. The area was under the authority of a short-lived Audiencia of Panama from 1538 to 1543, when most of Central America was placed under a new Audiencia of Guatemala.... In 1786, the Republic of El Salvador, which previously had been broken up into many corregimientos, was transformed into an intendancy, as part of the Bourbon Reforms..."

In El Salvador, today's "History of" country.