Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) returned to the United States on Friday after meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man whom Donald Trump’s administration illegally shipped to a prison in El Salvador and refuses to bring home, in open defiance of a Supreme Court order.
“It’s good to be home,” Van Hollen said at a press conference, standing next to Abrego Garcia’s wife. “Now we need to end the illegal abduction of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and bring him home, too.”
Van Hollen met on Thursday with Abrego Garcia at a hotel on Thursday, after being denied access to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the notorious mega-prison where the Trump administration recently said it is paying to hold Abrego Garcia.
Van Hollen shared details from his discussion with Abrego Garcia. He relayed that the prison guards “haven’t told [Abrego Garcia] anything” about why he’s being held in El Salvador. Van Hollen asked El Salvador’s vice president, Félix Ulloa, why the country is holding Abrego Garcia in prison when they have no evidence he’s committed a crime. He said that Ulloa answered: “Because the Trump administration is paying us.”
Abrego Garcia said he “was placed in a cell with about 25 other prisoners at CECOT,” according to Van Hollen. “He said he was not afraid of the other prisoners in his immediate cell, but that he was traumatized by being at CECOT, and fearful of many of the prisoners in other cell blocks who called out to him and taunted him in various ways.”
According to Van Hollen, Abrego Garcia believes that most of the cells at CECOT are “packed with about 100 people.” He noted that Abrego Garcia and the other prisoners held at CECOT are not permitted, as a matter of policy, to communicate with a lawyer, their family, or anyone, calling this “a violation of international law.”
The senator said that Abrego Garcia told him he had been moved out of CECOT to another prison eight days ago, to another detention center in Santa Ana. Six days ago, Trump State Department official Michael Kozak wrote in a court filing, under penalty of perjury, that he understood “based on official reporting from our Embassy in San Salvador that Abrego Garcia is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center.”
Abrego Garcia previously fled gang violence in El Salvador and traveled to the U.S. in 2011 when he was a teenager. He was granted a “protection from removal” order specifically barring his deportation to El Salvador, but he was among hundreds of immigrants whom the Trump administration last month sent to El Salvador without due process, citing spurious claims that they have ties to gangs that Trump has deemed terrorist organizations.
Trump’s administration has claimed Abrego Garcia was mistakenly sent there as a result of an “administrative error” — but has refused to bring him back. Instead, Trump officials have fought to keep him there, even after the Supreme Court ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return to the U.S.
Van Hollen posted an image of his meeting with Abrego Garcia on Thursday evening. “I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance,” he wrote on X. “I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love.”
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele posted photos from the meeting as well, after his aide reportedly placed two glasses with cherries and salted rims on the table in front of Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia in an apparent effort to muddle the narrative. “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 posted on X.
The New York Times reported that one of Bukele’s aides planted the tropical-looking drinks on the table to make it look like Abrego Garcia was living large. Van Hollen confirmed this on Friday. “This is a lesson into the lengths that President Bukele will go to deceive people about what’s going on,” he said, “and it also shows the lengths that the Trump administration and the president will go to, because when he was asked … about this, he just went along for the ride.”
Van Hollen added that Bukele’s government wanted the meeting to take place by a pool: “They actually wanted to have the meeting [take place] by the side of the pool in the hotel,” he said. “This is a guy who’s been in CECOT. This is a guy who has been detained. They want to create this appearance that life was just lovely for Kilmar, which, of course, is a big fat lie.”
Trump and Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator,” spent much of Friday mocking Van Hollen for traveling to meet with Abrego Garcia. Trump wrote on Truth Social that the senator “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media.”
Trump was asked about Van Hollen’s trip later on Friday while taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office. “He’s fake. I know him. I know them all,” he said of the senator. “They have no interest in that prisoner. That prisoner’s record is unbelievably bad. … I don’t know why you’d want to keep him — not a very innocent guy.”
Trump soon made clear that he’s largely unfamiliar with Abrego Garcia’s case. “You’re talking about Abrego Garcia, is that the one?” he said, reading off a piece of paper. “He’s an illegal alien, MS-13 gang member, and foreign terrorist. This comes out of the State Department and very legitimate sources, I assume. I’m just reading what they’re handing me. This is supposed to be certified stuff.”
It’s not legitimate.
Van Hollen also Friday read from an opinion on Abrego Garcia’s case issued by the federal district court judge, quoting the judge noting that “vague allegations of gang association alone do not supercede the express protections offered under the [Immigration and Nationality Act],” and that “no evidence before the court connects Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or any other criminal organization.”
“In other words,” Van Hollen said, “put up in court or shut up.”
On Thursday, three judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the administration’s request to avoid complying with the court orders to bring back Abrego Garcia.
The judges — led by Circuit Judge Harvie Wilkinson, a conservative Ronald Reagan appointee — wrote that the Trump administration’s “shocking” arguments in the Abrego Garcia case “would reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood.”
Van Hollen quoted from the opinion Friday: “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. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
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