By YOLANDA MAGAÑA, MARY CLARE JALONICK and MATT BROWN, Associated Press
SAN SALVADOR (AP) — Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador on Wednesday and met with the country’s vice president to push for the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man who was sent there by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation.
Van Hollen, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said at a news conference in San Salvador after the meeting that Vice President Félix Ulloa said his government could not return Abrego Garcia to the United States and declined to allow Van Hollen to visit him in the notorious gang prison where he is being held.
“Why is government of El Salvador continuing to imprison a man where they have no evidence that he’s committed any crime and they have not been provided any evidence from the United States that he has committed any crime?” Van Hollen told reporters after the meeting. “They should just let him go.”
The Trump administration and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said this week that they have no basis to send him back, even as even as the U.S. Supreme Court has called on the administration to facilitate his return. Trump officials have said that Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who was living in Maryland, has ties to the MS-13 gang, but his attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of that and Abrego Garcia has disputed that claim. He has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.
“We have an unjust situation here,” Van Hollen said. “The Trump administration is lying about Abrego Garcia. The American courts have looked at the facts.”
Democrats have seized on the case to highlight what they say is President Donald Trump’s disrespect for the courts and h and as base voters have encouraged them to fight harder against Trump’s policies. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., is also considering a trip to El Salvador, as are some House Democrats.
“This is a constitutional crisis,” said Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., one of the Democrats who is considering a trip, told The Associated Press. “This is not just about a deportation policy. This is about defying the Constitution and the Supreme Court.”
Garcia sent a joint letter with Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., to the Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., requesting a congressional delegation to travel to El Salvador to investigate Abrego Garcia’s condition. Garcia said if the trip isn’t approved, some Democrats still plan to travel to the Central American nation.
“We need to bring attention to this case. We need to be in El Salvador. We need to work with the family. We need to work with the Salvadoran government. We need to pressure the White House to do the right thing,” Garcia said.
Trump officials slammed the Democratic senator’s trip and renewed their claims that Abrego Garcia was a gang member.
Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said on Fox News that he is “disgusted that any congressional representative is going to run to El Salvador.”
“We got rid of a dangerous person, an El Salvadoran national was returned to the country of El Salvador, so he is home,” Homan said.
Some Republicans have planned trips to the prison as well, 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.
The fight over Abrego Garcia 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 Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake but also has argued, essentially, that its conclusion about Abrego Garcia’s affiliation makes him ineligible for protection from the courts.
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 of 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 previously accused Bukele’s government of subjecting those jailed to “systematic use of torture and other mistreatment.” Officials there deny wrongdoing.
Van Hollen said after his meeting that Abrego Garcia was “illegally abducted from the United States and committed no crime.”
“I will keep pressing in my remaining time here and I will keep pressing beyond that,” Van Hollen said.
Jalonick and Brown reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.
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