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Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen said he was denied a meeting with a wrongfully deported Maryland father imprisoned in a brutal Salvadoran jail following Donald Trump’s refusal to return him to the United States.
The Maryland senator traveled to El Salvador on Wednesday to help secure Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release from the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, where he faces the prospect of indefinite detention.
But he was denied a meeting with Abrego Garcia, and Salvadoran officials would not let the senator or Abrego Garcia’s family speak with him by phone, he said.
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El Salvador has recently allowed Republican members of Congress inside CECOT, as well as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was filmed in front of a row of men crowded behind bars.
The country denied that same access to the senator who represents the state where Abrego Garcia has been living with his wife and children.
“I asked the vice president if I could meet with Abrego Garcia, and he said you need to make earlier provisions to go visit CECOT,” Van Hollen told reporters from San Salvador on Wednesday.
“I said, ‘I’m not interested in this moment of taking a tour of CECOT, I just want to meet Mr. Abrego Garcia,’” he said. “He said he was not able to make that happen.”
El Salvador’s vice president Felix Ulloa said he “couldn’t promise next week either,” according to Van Hollen.
“So I asked if I could get on the phone, either video phone or just a phone, and talk with Mr. Abrego Garcia,” he said.
That was also denied, he said.
The vice president also said he wasn’t sure whether Abrego Garcia’s wife or family members would be able to speak with him, according to Van Hollen.
“We have an unjust situation here,” he said.
White House communications director Steven Cheung called Van Hollen a “complete disgrace to his office” and said he “should be thoroughly shamed for his disgusting actions.”
“Chris and his bedwetting friends have shown more concern and sympathy for an illegal MS-13 gang member than victims of horrific migrant crimes,” he wrote.
Trump’s border czar Tom Homan called the trip “disgusting” on Fox News.
A statement from Homeland Security said Van Hollen” has done more to bring a MS-13 gang member, human trafficker and illegal alien back to Maryland than he has to help keep his American constituents safe or advocate for the victims of these vicious gangs like MS-13.”
Van Hollen, however, said the Salvadoran government does not have any evidence that Abrego Garcia was a member of the transnational gang.
The Trump administration is “lying when they say he has been charged with a crime or is part of MS-13. That is a lie,” he said.
“And this is a life to cover up what they did,” he said. “They illegally abducted Mr. Abrego Garcia from Maryland and sent him to CECOT.”
Asked why El Salvador refuses to release him, the country’s vice president told Van Hollen that the Trump administration is paying to keep him there, the senator said.
The State Department has arranged a $6 million deal to house hundreds of immigrants inside CECOT.
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Abrego Garcia fled El Salvador in 2011 when he was 16 years old. He entered the United States illegally at the time but a judge in 2019 granted a withholding order that prevents his removal from the country for humanitarian reasons.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested him during a traffic stop last month, and he was swiftly deported to a prison described by human rights groups as a “tropical gulag.”
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 instead are fighting in court to continue his imprisonment as a member of a “foreign terrorist organization,” which administration officials argue supersedes any court order against his removal.
“If we get rid of due process in the United States, it’s a short road from there to tyranny,” the senator said in a video from the airport on Wednesday morning.
The administration is also refusing to share evidence to support allegations that he is a member or “leader” of MS-13 or “involved in human trafficking.”
Asked why the administration isn’t publicly disclosing that evidence, Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters on Wednesday that Abrego Garcia is “an illegal alien who has been living illegally in our country from El Salvador.”
“He is not coming back to our country” and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele “said he was not sending him back,” she said.
“That’s the end of the story,” according to Bondi. “If he wanted to send him back, we would give him a plane ride back. There was no situation, ever, where he was going to stay in this country. None. None. He would’ve come back, had one extra strep of paper work, and gone back again. But he’s from El Salvador, he’s in El Salvador, and that’s where the president plans on keeping him.”
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Other Democratic members of Congress are requesting a congressional delegation to visit CECOT.
Representatives Maxwell Frost of Florida and Robert Garcia of California wrote to Republican House Oversight Committee chair James Comer Tuesday for permission to perform a “welfare check” on Abrego Garcia.
“We must all stand as a united front against the kidnapping and illegal detention of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador,” Frost wrote this week. “Senator, I am willing to join you and help Organize other members of the House to do the same.”
Last week, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s “release from custody in El Salvador,” which the justices appeared to agree was “illegal.”
On Tuesday, a federal judge in Maryland rebuked the Trump administration for doing “nothing” since then.
Judge Paul Xinis will determine whether the administration is acting in “good faith” after getting “no real response” about any efforts to secure his release despite a unanimous ruling from the nation’s high court. “There will be no tolerance for gamesmanship or grandstanding,” she said.
Trump administration officials must provide the court with firm answers about Abrego Garcia’s “current physical location and custodial status” as well as “what steps, if any,” they have taken to “facilitate” his “immediate return to the United States.”
