Maryland Sen. Van Hollen meets with El Salvador's vice president in push
for Abrego Garcia's release
[April 17, 2025]
By YOLANDA MAGAÑA, MARY CLARE JALONICK and MATT BROWN
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 said at a news conference in San Salvador 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 the 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.”
Van Hollen’s trip became a flashpoint in the U.S. The Trump
administration sharply criticized it, while Democrats have rallied
around Abrego Garcia.
President Donald Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said this
week that they have no basis to send him back, 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 never been charged with any crime related to such activity.
“We have an unjust situation here,” said Van Hollen, a member of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “The Trump administration is lying
about Abrego Garcia. The American courts have looked at the facts.”
Trump officials reiterated Wednesday that he would not be returned to
the United States. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt held a
press briefing with the mother of a Maryland woman, Rachel Morin, who
was killed by a fugitive from El Salvador in 2023.
“It’s appalling and sad that Sen. Van Hollen and the Democrats
applauding his trip to El Salvador today are incapable of having any
shred of common sense or empathy for their own constituents and our
citizens," Leavitt said at the briefing.
Republicans have focused on the victims of crime committed by people in
the U.S. illegally in arguing for Trump's promised immigration crackdown
and mass deportations.
Democrats, meanwhile, have seized on the case to highlight what they say
is Trump's disrespect for the courts 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. “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 House
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.
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Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen speaks to the press in La Libertad,
El Salvador, where he arrived regarding Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a
Salvadoran citizen who was living in Maryland and deported to El
Salvador by the Trump administration, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP
Photo/Salvador Melendez)
Rep. Yassamin Ansari, an Arizona Democrat, wrote in a Wednesday
statement that she plans to travel to El Salvador to support Abrego
Garcia's return.
“My parents fled an authoritarian regime in Iran where people
‘disappeared’ — I refuse to sit back and watch it happen here, too,”
wrote Ansari, who is Iranian American and the youngest woman in
Congress.
Trump officials renewed their claims that Abrego Garcia was a gang
member.
Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, said on Fox News' “Fox & Friends”
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 visited 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.
Republican Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, the chairman of the House
Ways and Means Committee, also visited the prison. He posted on X
that “thanks to President Trump" the facility “now includes illegal
immigrants who broke into our country and committed violent acts
against Americans.”
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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