SAN SALVADOR — Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen met Thursday in El Salvador with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man who was sent there by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation.
A prison guard transfers deportees from the U.S., alleged to be Venezuelan gang members, to the Terrorism Confinement Center on March 16 in Tecoluca, El Salvador.
Van Hollen posted a photo of the meeting on X, saying he also called Abrego Garcia's wife “to pass along his message of love.†The lawmaker did not provide an update on the status of Abrego Garcia, whose attorneys are fighting to force the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the U.S.
El Salvador’s Presidnet Nayib Bukele posted images of the meeting minutes before Van Hollen shared his post, saying “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!â€
The meeting came hours after Van Hollen said he was denied entry into an high-security El Salvador prison Thursday while he was trying to check on Abrego Garcia's well-being and push for his release.
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The Democratic senator said at a news conference in San Salvador that his car was stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint about 3 kilometers (about 2 miles) from the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, even as they let other cars go on.
“They stopped us because they are under orders not to allow us to proceed," Van Hollen said.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Bukele said this week that they have no basis to send Abrego Garcia back, even as the Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake and 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.
Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen speaks to the press Wednesday 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.
Van Hollen’s trip has become a partisan flashpoint in the U.S. as Democrats have seized on Abrego Garcia's deportation as what they say is a cruel consequence of Trump's disregard for the courts. Republicans have criticized Democrats for defending him and argued that his deportation is part of a larger effort to reduce crime. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt held a news conference Wednesday with the mother of a Maryland woman who was killed by a fugitive from El Salvador in 2023.
The Maryland senator told reporters Wednesday that he met with Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa, who said his government could not return Abrego Garcia to the United States.
“So today, I tried again to make contact with Mr. Abrego Garcia by driving to the CECOT prison,†Van Hollen said Thursday.
Van Hollen said Abrego Garcia has not had any contact with his family or his lawyers. “There has been no ability to find out anything about his health and well-being," Van Hollen said. He said Abrego Garcia should be able to have contact with his lawyers under international law.
“We won’t give up until Kilmar has his due process rights respected,†Van Hollen said. He said there would be “many more†lawmakers coming to El Salvador.
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., is also considering a trip to El Salvador, as are some House Democrats.
While Van Hollen was denied entry, several House Republicans have visited the notorious gang prison 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.â€
“I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,†Moore wrote on social media.
Missouri Republican Rep. Jason Smith, chair 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.â€
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.
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 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 accused Bukele's government of subjecting those jailed to “systematic use of torture and other mistreatment." Officials there deny wrongdoing.
Trump vs. the courts: Presidential attacks open new front in long battle
Trump vs. the courts: Presidential attacks open new front in long battle
On March 15, three planes left the U.S., bound for a mega-prison in El Salvador. The Trump administration justified the deportation by saying most of the men on the planes were members of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) criminal gang.
Lawyers for some of the men say their clients were misidentified as gang members, in many cases, unrelated to TdA. In one case, a lawyer says the tattoo may have been for the popular Real Madrid soccer team.
None of the men had the opportunity to argue against the administration's assertion in court because they were deported under the Alien Enemies Act, which President Donald Trump had . The act gives the government the from hostile nations during wartime or an invasion, without due process.
The U.S. Venezuela or TdA, nor is the gang a country—one of several reasons federal judge James Boasberg ordered the planes to turn around on March 15. Boasberg concluded that the administration to make the deportations.
Despite the order, the planes landed, and the men were taken into the custody of the Salvadoran prison, complete with by Trump . The episode set off a legal and political firestorm over whether the administration had , and what would come next if so.
"If anyone is being detained or removed based on the administration's assertion that it can do so without judicial review or due process," Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia, "the president is asserting dictatorial power and 'constitutional crisis' doesn't capture the gravity of the situation."
There are about 1,700 federal judges in the U.S., and all are appointed by presidents and confirmed by the U.S. Senate—not elected, explains. Trump and his allies have argued that it is, in effect, judge, from any district, can overrule the will of the president on a national level.
Skepticism of the federal courts on these grounds is or conservative preoccupation: In the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the 2022 Supreme Court decision that struck down Roe v. Wade, prominent Democrats also . A few even for .
More broadly, presidents have long jockeyed with the courts over power. Franklin D. Roosevelt's to up to 15 justices to add members sympathetic to his New Deal programs is just one memorable example.
However, Trump's attacks on the judiciary are unprecedented in some ways, especially the extent to which they've been directed at individual judges.
Trump has called Boasberg—who was —"a radical left lunatic" and called for his impeachment. Almost immediately, some Republican House members against Boasberg. The effort is unlikely to go far, as it would to convict. Still, some experts see it as an escalation in Trump's . To date, no federal judge "because of dissatisfaction with his or her rulings," a former judge told NPR.
The personalized and agitated tenor around judges has . That was true over the deportation flights.
Congressional Republicans are pursuing legislation that would altogether. On Thursday, Trump also called for the Supreme Court to issue national injunctions.
If either came to fruition, it would massively untether the administration from judicial checks. According to The Washington Post, there are where a federal judge paused or reversed a Trump administration policy. That means about once every four days since Trump's inauguration, that the administration likely broke the law.
Trump officials have , and on March 19 "border czar" Tom Homan said that he will before using it for more deportation flights. But at the same time, Boasberg has ruled that administration lawyers about the deportations or gave "woefully insufficient" answers.
If the Trump administration were to simply begin ignoring the courts, it's unclear what could be done to stop it. —an agency under the Department of Justice. As Vox's Ian Millhiser wrote this week: Trump could simply tell the U.S. attorney general to instruct marshals not to enforce court orders against his administration.
While Congress could impeach Trump if he blatantly ignores the law, that outcome is unlikely for the same partisan reasons that will probably save Boasberg from removal.
Still, some argue that the point isn't necessarily defiance—it may be just as much about the spectacle of defiance and punishment. In a post this week, historian Timothy Snyder more for public consumption than to achieve any discrete immigration enforcement goal.
"They are deliberately associating the law itself with people, the deportees, who they expect to be unpopular," Snyder wrote. "In this way they hope to get popular opinion on their side as they ignore a court order. But if they succeed in making an exception once, it becomes the rule."
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