Senator Meets Abrego Garcia, Trump Immigration Victim, in El Salvador

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) on Thursday evening posted an image showing him meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland immigrant whom Donald Trump’s administration illegally deported to El Salvador and refused to bring home, despite a Supreme Court order.

Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador on Wednesday seeking to meet with Abrego Garcia. He said he was denied access to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, where the Trump administration recently said Abrego Garcia is being held. 

“I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance,” Van Hollen posted on X. “I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.” 

Trump is paying El Salvador millions to hold Abrego Garcia and hundreds more migrants in a prison system known as a “judicial black hole” rife with torture, while musing about sending U.S. citizens — “homegrown” criminals, in Trump’s words — there, too.

Abrego Garcia fled gang violence in El Salvador and came to the U.S. as a teenager in 2011. He was previously granted a “protection from removal” order barring his deportation to El Salvador, but he was among hundreds of immigrants whom the Trump administration last month shipped to El Salvador without due process, citing specious claims that the men had ties to gangs that the president has deemed terrorist organizations. The Trump administration has alleged he was mistakenly sent there as a result of an “administrative error.”

Based on the withholding order, Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador was “illegal,” the Supreme Court found last week. The conservative-dominated high court unanimously upheld a lower court order directing the Trump administration to “facilitate” his release from prison in El Salvador, and to “be prepared to share” what it was doing to bring him home.  

The Trump administration has refused to comply with the orders from the Supreme Court and lower court, arguing it doesn’t need to — while also claiming that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and leading a broader PR smear campaign against him. He has never been charged with a crime.

Trump and his top officials and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele recently suggested in a meeting in the Oval Office that it would be impossible to send Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. 

“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Bukele said Monday. “Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.”

An appeals court wrote on Thursday that the Trump administration’s “shocking” arguments in Abrego Garcia’s case “would reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood.”

The three-judge panel added, “The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

Van Hollen said Wednesday he had spoken with El Salvador’s vice president, Félix Ulloa, and asked him why Abrego Garcia was being held in prison without any evidence that he’s a gang member. “His answer was that the Trump administration is paying the government of El Salvador to keep him at CECOT,” the senator said. 

Bukele posted several photos of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia, along with a sneering message: “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture.’ now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” he wrote. 

Bukele, the self-professed “world’s coolest dictator,” added in another post, “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”