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Senator Chris Van Hollen has finally met with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the mistakenly deported Salvadoran father Donald Trump’s administration is fighting to keep inside a brutal El Salvador jail.
The senator from Maryland traveled to El Salvador this week to ensure Abrego Garcia’s safety and help secure his release.
After he was initially denied a meeting or a chance to speak with the Maryland father, the senator posted a photo on social media late Thursday night that shows him sitting with Abrego Garcia at a table in what appeared to be a dining room.
“I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance,” the senator wrote. “I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.”
El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele appeared to mock the meeting, and said Abrego Garcia would remain inside his Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, which human rights groups have labeled a “tropical gulag” and concentration camp.
“Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” Bukele wrote. “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”
Abrego Garcia has spent more than a month inside the prison despite a court order that prevents his removal from the U.S. for humanitarian reasons. He fled the country as a teenager and is now a sheet-metal apprentice in Maryland, where he has been living with his wife and 5-year-old child, both U.S. citizens. The couple is also raising two other children from a previous relationship.
The White House and government attorneys have repeatedly admitted that his removal was due to an “administrative error.” But the administration has refused to seek his return and officials are instead fighting in court to continue his imprisonment as an alleged member of MS-13, which is designated a foreign terrorist organization. Administration officials argue that supersedes any court order against his removal.
Last week, the Supreme Court ordered the administration to “facilitate” his “release from custody in El Salvador,” noting that officials agreed sending him there was “illegal.”
On Thursday, a three-judge federal appeals court panel in Washington, D.C., denied the Trump administration’s emergency request to block a court order to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling.
A blistering order written by Ronald Reagan-appointed appellate judge J. Harvie Wilkinson stated that 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.”
While the Supreme Court’s order notes a deference to the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy, that ruling does not “allow the government to do essentially nothing,” Wilkinson wrote.
“‘Facilitate’ is an active verb,” he added. “It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear.”
