SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., on Wednesday tried and failed to secure a meeting in El Salvador with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant and Maryland resident who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration and remains imprisoned in his native country.
Van Hollen’s trip was the latest chapter in an intensifying political battle over the case of Abrego Garcia, who was removed from the United States last month in what immigration officials acknowledged was an error. Although the Supreme Court has instructed the U.S. government to facilitate his return, both American and Salvadoran authorities have so far refused to do so.
Van Hollen met with El Salvador’s vice president, Félix Ulloa, as well as officials at the U.S. Embassy there, but he came away with no assurances that he would be able to see or even speak to Abrego Garcia, who is being held in a notorious maximum security prison known for human rights violations.
And his visit did little to change the minds of the Trump administration or Salvadoran officials who have refused to release Abrego Garcia. After his meeting with Ulloa, Van Hollen told reporters that the explanation the vice president provided for continuing to keep Abrego Garcia in detention in the absence of a criminal charge against him was that the Trump administration was paying El Salvador to do so.
“I’m asking President Bukele under his authority as president of El Salvador to do the right thing and allow Mr. Abrego Garcia to walk out of a prison — a man who’s charged with no crime, convicted of no crime and who was illegally abducted from the United States,” Van Hollen told reporters in San Salvador, the capital.
The Trump administration has accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of the dangerous transnational gang MS-13. Van Hollen portrayed him instead as an innocent family man who was illegally “abducted” from the streets of Maryland in a miscarriage of justice, and bluntly accused the Trump administration of “lying” to justify its mistakes in deporting him.
“We have an unjust situation here. The Trump administration is lying about Abrego Garcia,” Van Hollen said.
He called out President Donald Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Vice President JD Vance by name, saying that claims from top administration officials that Abrego Garcia had been charged with a crime or was part of MS-13 were inaccurate.
The senator said he hoped to visit Abrego Garcia at the prison, known as CECOT, about an hour outside San Salvador, but that Ulloa had cast doubt on his chances of doing so.
“I said I’m not interested at this moment in taking a tour of CECOT, I just want to meet with Mr. Abrego Garcia,” Van Hollen said he told the Salvadoran vice president. “He said he was not able to make that happen. He said he needed a little more time.”
He was similarly noncommittal about the chance of allowing Abrego Garcia’s family to speak with him, saying that such requests would have to come from officials from the U.S. Embassy there, which is run by the Trump administration.
A spokesperson for the Salvadoran presidency, Wendy Ramos, did not immediately respond to a request for the government’s comment on Van Hollen’s remarks. White House officials said in March that the U.S. government was paying the Salvadoran government $6 million to hold deported members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Officials have not said whether that also covers the detention of Salvadorans removed as part of the same operation, like Abrego Garcia.
Van Hollen made his visit shortly after President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador traveled to Washington this week for a meeting with Trump. The leaders appeared side-by-side in the Oval Office, with Bukele saying he had no intention of releasing Abrego Garcia and Trump saying he was powerless to seek his return.
Van Hollen said he had been unable to meet with Bukele on Wednesday because he was traveling.
The case has supercharged a partisan battle over immigration. Democrats argue that the Trump administration defied the law in deporting and then refusing to return Abrego Garcia, who entered the United States illegally but was later granted “withholding of removal” status in 2019. Trump and other Republicans accuse Democrats of catering to a dangerous criminal who has no right to be in the United States.
At a news conference in Washington on Wednesday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, savaged Democrats, saying they were “rushing to defend an illegal foreign terrorist gang member.” And she invited Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a Maryland woman the authorities say was raped and murdered by an immigrant who was in the country illegally two years ago, to tell her daughter’s story in gruesome detail in an apparent effort to stoke outrage against such immigrants.
In a statement Wednesday, the National Republican Congressional Committee said Democrats were acting as “travel agents for illegal immigrants.”
Earlier, asked about Abrego Garcia’s case, Bondi said he would not be repatriated unless the Salvadoran president decided to return him. Even if that happened, she said, the United States would immediately deport him again.
“President Bukele said he was not sending him back,” Bondi said. “That’s the end of the story.” She added that Abrego Garcia is “from El Salvador, he’s in El Salvador and that’s where the president plans on keeping him.”
With Congress in a two-week recess and Abrego Garcia’s fate becoming increasingly politicized, more members of Congress were making trips to El Salvador to weigh in on his case. At least two House Republicans, Riley Moore of West Virginia and Jason Smith of Missouri, toured the prison where Abrego Garcia was being held, although it was unclear whether they met with or saw him during their visit.
Both lawmakers posted photos on social media from inside the facility and argued in favor of its continued use as a destination for imprisoning deportees, as well as criminals from the United States.
“I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Moore wrote, alongside photos of him posing with thumbs up in front of a jail cell where several inmates were being held in multitiered metal bunks.
Smith praised Trump’s use of the facility and wrote that it was “unconscionable that Democrats in Congress are urging the release of more foreign criminals back into our country.”
Reps. Maxwell Alejandro Frost of Florida and Robert Garcia of California, both Democrats, also planned to visit El Salvador, according to two people familiar with their plans who discussed them on the condition of anonymity because they were not yet final.
The two wrote on Tuesday to Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., who chairs the House Oversight Committee, requesting an official congressional delegation be sent to the nation to conduct a “welfare check” on Abrego Garcia.
Frost and Garcia also said more oversight was needed given Trump’s remarks this week that he wanted to send “homegrown criminals,” including American citizens, to the Salvadoran prison.
“I may be the first United States senator to visit El Salvador on this issue, but there will be more and there will more members of Congress coming,” Van Hollen said Wednesday.