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SAN SALVADOR (AP) — Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen met with Kilmar Abrego Garcia on Thursday evening in El Salvador, coming face to face with the wrongly deported man after two days in the country pushing for his release.
The Democratic senator posted a photo of the meeting on X but did not provide an update on the status of Abrego Garcia, whose attorneys are fighting to force the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the U.S.
A Salvadoran citizen who was living in Maryland, Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation. U.S. President Donald Trump and Bukele said this week that they have no basis to return him to the United States, even as the Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake and the U.S. Supreme Court has called on the administration to facilitate his return.
“I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar,” Van Hollen wrote on X, with a photo of the two men talking in what appeared to be a restaurant. “Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.”
It’s not clear how the meeting was arranged, where they met or what will happen to Abrego Garcia. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele posted images of the meeting minutes before Van Hollen shared his post, saying, “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” The tweet ended with emojis of the U.S. and El Salvador flags, with a handshake emoji between them.
Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, said in a statement released by an advocacy group that “we still have so many questions, hopes, and fears.”
Van Hollen’s trip has become a partisan flashpoint in the U.S. as Democrats have seized on Abrego Garcia’s deportation as what they say is a cruel consequence of Trump’s disregard for the courts. A federal appeals court said Thursday in a blistering order that the Trump administration’s claim that it can’t do anything to free Abrego Garcia from an El Salvador prison and return him to the U.S. “ should be shocking. ”
Republicans have criticized Democrats for defending the prisoner and argued that his deportation is part of a larger effort to reduce crime. White House officials have said that Abrego Garcia has ties to the MS-13 gang, but his attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of that and Abrego Garcia has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.
More Democrats have said they will travel to El Salvador to argue for Abrego Garcia’s release, but it’s unclear if the trips, or Van Hollen’s meeting, will have any effect on his status. When asked by reporters Thursday afternoon if he believed Abrego Garcia was entitled to due process, President Donald Trump ducked the question.
“I have to refer, again, to the lawyers,” he said in the Oval Office. “I have to do what they ask me to do.”
A spokeswoman for El Salvador’s presidency said she had no further information on the meeting or Abrego Garcia,
Van Hollen’s meeting came hours after he said he was denied entry into the high-security Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, where Abrego Garcia is being held. The Democratic senator said at a news conference in San Salvador on Thursday afternoon, before his meeting, that his car was stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint about 3 kilometers (about 2 miles) from the prison even as they let other cars go on.
“They stopped us because they are under orders not to allow us to proceed,” Van Hollen said.
While Van Hollen was denied entry, several House Republicans have visited the notorious gang prison in support of the Trump administration’s efforts. Rep. Riley Moore, a West Virginia Republican, posted Tuesday evening that he’d visited the prison where Abrego Garcia is being held. He did not mention Abrego Garcia but said the facility “houses the country’s most brutal criminals.”
“I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Moore wrote on social media.
Missouri Republican Rep. Jason Smith, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, also visited the prison. He posted on X that “thanks to President Trump” the facility “now includes illegal immigrants who broke into our country and committed violent acts against Americans.”
Van Hollen first arrived in El Salvador on Wednesday morning and met shortly afterward with Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa, who told him that his government could not return Abrego Garcia to the United States.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials acknowledged in a court filing earlier this month that his deportation was an “ administrative error.” The government’s acknowledgment sparked immediate uproar from immigration advocates, but White House officials have dug in on the allegation that he’s a gang member and will not be returned to the United States.
The fight has also played out in contentious court filings, with repeated refusals from the government to tell a judge what it plans to do, if anything, to repatriate him. The three-judge panel from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously refused Thursday to suspend the judge’s decision to order sworn testimony by Trump administration officials and said the judiciary will be hurt by the “constant intimations of its illegitimacy” while the executive branch “will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness.”
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who was nominated by Republican President Ronald Reagan, wrote that he and his two colleagues “cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos.”
Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the U.S. more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants — whom Trump administration officials have accused of gang activity and violent crimes — and placed them inside the country’s maximum-security gang prison just outside San Salvador. That prison is part of Bukele’s broader effort to crack down on the country’s powerful street gangs, which has put 84,000 people behind bars and made Bukele extremely popular at home.
Human rights groups have accused Bukele’s government of subjecting those jailed to “systematic use of torture and other mistreatment.” Officials there deny wrongdoing.
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Jalonick reported from Washington.
Yolanda Magaña And Mary Clare Jalonick, The Associated Press
