Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen was flying home from El Salvador on Friday after meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported there by the Trump administration. It’s unclear what will happen next in the case.
More Democrats have said they will fly to El Salvador to push for his release, but the partisan pressure hasn’t yielded any results. President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele have dug in on keeping Abrego Garcia out of the United States, even as officials in Trump’s Republican administration have called his deportation a mistake and the U.S. Supreme Court has called on the administration to facilitate his return.
Bukele posted images of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia on Thursday and said that the prisoner in the country’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, “gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said he will “never live in the United States of America again.”
The fight over Abrego Garcia is the latest partisan flashpoint as Democrats have struggled to break through and push back during the opening few months of Trump’s second time in office.
Democrats say the fight isn’t just about one man’s immigration status but about Trump’s defiance of the courts that have repeatedly weighed in on the case. 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 the prison in El Salvador and return him to the United States “should be shocking.”
But Republicans appear to have only become more determined to keep Abrego Garcia out of the country. They have sharply criticized Van Hollen’s trip and claimed that Abrego Garcia has ties to the MS-13 gang. His attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of gang involvement and he has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.
Democrats “have time and again prioritized politics over the safety and security of Americans,” Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said in a statement Friday. “It is utterly divorced from reality.”
Van Hollen, who will talk to reporters after landing in the Washington area later Friday, has said he won’t stop fighting for the release of Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who was living in Maryland.
“This is about bringing home a man they ADMIT should’ve never been abducted,” Van Hollen posted on X.
The Democratic senator posted a photo of his meeting with Abrego Garcia on Thursday evening but did not provide an update on his status. He said he had called Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, “to pass on a message of love” and would provide a full update upon his return.
It’s unclear how the meeting was arranged, where they met or what will happen to Abrego Garcia. Vasquez Sura said in a statement released by an advocacy group that “we still have so many questions, hopes, and fears.”
After days of denying that he knew much about Abrego Garcia, Trump on Friday said he knew Abrego Garcia was “unbelievably bad” and called him an “illegal alien” and a “foreign terrorist.”
The president also responded Friday with a social media post saying Van Hollen “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention.”
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. “I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Moore wrote on social media.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials acknowledged in a court filing earlier this month that Abrego Garcia’s 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.
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, nominated by President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, 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.
