SAN SALVADOR — 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.
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.
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Jalonick and Brown reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.
