Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) has requested a congressional delegation to visit a prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration has sent numerous deportees.
In a Wednesday letter addressed to House Homeland Security Committee Chair Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), Ramirez asked “that the House Committee on Homeland Security authorize a Congressional Member Delegation (CODEL) to conduct an oversight visit to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in Tecoluca, El Salvador.”
In the first few months of President Trump’s second presidency, his administration has sent hundreds of deportees to the Salvadoran maximum-security prison CECOT.
“Given that the Administration’s use of CECOT for illegal and unconstitutional deportations is rife with ‘administrative errors’ and many of those who have been deported to CECOT are not, in fact, violent criminals, as a Member of the House Committee on Homeland Security Committee, I urgently request a CODEL to conduct oversight of CECOT. Thank you for the consideration of this request,” Ramirez said in her letter, which Axios first obtained.
The story of one of the deportees sent to CECOT, a wrongfully deported Maryland man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia, has recently made political waves in Washington, D.C.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a rising star among Democrats, called Abrego Garcia’s case “the constitutional crisis” in a video posted on Tuesday on the social platform X. In the video, Murphy argued that Abrego Garcia should not have been deported because he was previously given protected status by a U.S. court.
“Donald Trump ignored that court order and deported him,” Murphy said in the video. “It was such a brazen violation of the law that the Supreme Court weighed in. In a rare 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court said that Trump had to bring this individual back to the United States, but he still didn’t do it. This is the constitutional crisis.”
The Hill has reached out to Green’s office for comment.
