El Salvador refuses to allow senator to meet with mistakenly deported man
El Salvador’s government rebuffed a request Wednesday from Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) to free Kilmar Abrego García, whose case has become a flash point in the battle over President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign since the administration mistakenly deported him last month.
Van Hollen flew to El Salvador on Wednesday to lobby for the release of Abrego García, a Salvadoran-born man living in Maryland who fled that country more than a decade ago. Abrego García is one of hundreds of migrants whom the Trump administration has deported to El Salvador, where they have been imprisoned without due process in El Salvador’s notorious megaprison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.
The Trump administration has said it can’t do anything to secure Abrego García’s release and has accused him of being an MS-13 gang member despite his lawyers denying the charge. A federal judge has said there is no evidence of his membership in the group, which the Trump administration designated a foreign terrorist organization.
“President Trump and our attorney general, Pam Bondi, and the vice president of the United States are lying when they say that Abrego García has been charged with a crime or is part of MS-13,” Van Hollen told reporters in El Salvador on Wednesday. “That is a lie.”
Van Hollen said he met with U.S. Embassy officials as well as El Salvador’s vice president, Félix Ulloa.
Ulloa refused to release Abrego García or to allow Van Hollen to meet with him or speak to him by phone, Van Hollen said, although Ulloa said the U.S. Embassy might be able to arrange a phone call. Van Hollen said Ulloa echoed Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s remark during a meeting with Trump at the White House on Monday that El Salvador could not “smuggle” Abrego García back into the United States.
“I said I’m not asking him to smuggle Mr. Abrego García into the United States,” Van Hollen told reporters. “I’m simply asking him to open the door of CECOT” and “and let this innocent man walk out.”
The Supreme Court ruled last week that the Trump administration must “facilitate” Abrego García’s return to the United States. The administration has acknowledged that it erred in deporting Abrego García because a judge had prohibited sending him to El Salvador — but the White House has not rushed to bring him back. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said the administration has refused a “clear” Supreme Court order, and ordered a probe into whether officials have obeyed her orders.
Many Democrats have taken up Abrego García’s case, arguing that the administration is risking a constitutional crisis by deporting him illegally and failing to bring him back. The White House and Republicans have accused Abrego García of membership in the MS-13 gang and mocked Democrats for advocating for him.
“They are jumping on airplanes and headed down to El Salvador to apparently go camp outside the prison camp where terrorists and murderers and rapists are held to say, ‘You know what America needs is more of those terrorists, murderers and rapists back in America,' ” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said on his podcast, “Verdict With Ted Cruz.”
Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador after unsuccessfully seeking a meeting this week with Bukele while Bukele was in Washington.
He is not the first member of Congress to travel to El Salvador. Reps. Jason T. Smith (R-Mo.) and Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) shared photos Tuesday of themselves at CECOT, and Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) said Tuesday they would like to travel there as part of a congressional delegation to check on Abrego García. Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem also toured CECOT.
“I may be the first United States senator to visit El Salvador on this issue, but there will be more and there will be more members of Congress coming,” Van Hollen said.
Other Democrats have taken up Abrego García’s case. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has called for Abrego García’s immediate return. And Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) accused the administration Wednesday of using Abrego García “as a test case to see what it can get away with, laying the groundwork to send American citizens to a foreign gulag.”
“This is the time to get angry and get loud,” Wyden wrote on X.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement alleged that Abrego García belonged to a gang based on a Prince George’s County Police Department “Gang Field Interview Sheet.” A Baltimore immigration judge wrote in 2019 that Abrego García was “confirmed to be a ranking member of the MS-13 gang by a proven and reliable source.”
But another judge ruled in Abrego García’s favor, writing that he and his relatives had credibly testified that gang members had tried to extort money from his mother’s pupusa shop, threatened to kill them and tried to recruit Abrego García and his brother into the gang.
The White House has accused Van Hollen and other Democrats of prioritizing Abrego García’s case over combating illegal immigration. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared at a press briefing Wednesday with Patty Morin, whose daughter, Rachel Morin, was raped and murdered in Maryland in 2023 by a fugitive from El Salvador. Morin criticized Van Hollen for using her “taxpayer money to fly to El Salvador to bring back someone who’s not even an American citizen.”
“Why does that person have more right than I do or my daughter or my grandchildren?” Morin asked. “I don’t understand this.”
Leavitt described Van Hollen’s mission to free Abrego García as futile because the administration would deport him again if he managed to return to the country.
“If he ever ends up back in the United States, he would immediately be deported again,” Leavitt said. “Nothing will change the fact that Abrego García will never be a Maryland father. He will never live in the United States of America again.”
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• Marianna Sotomayor contributed.