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Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador this week to demand the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national deported from the US under the Trump administration due to alleged ties to MS-13.
“The goal of this mission is to let the Trump administration, to let the government of El Salvador know that we are going to keep fighting to bring Abrego Garcia home until he returns to his family,” Van Hollen said in a video on X.
Speaking at a press conference in San Salvador after meeting with Vice President Félix Ulloa, the Maryland senator explained that El Salvador has said it cannot return Abrego Garcia. The country also declined to allow Van Hollen to visit Abrego Garcia in the 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, according to the Associated Press. “They should just let him go.”
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele met with President Donald Trump at the White House this week, where both leaders stated there was no legal basis to send Abrego Garcia back to the United States. The comments came despite a US Supreme Court ruling ordering the Trump administration to facilitate his return.
Abrego Garcia, who had been living in Maryland, was deported after the government linked him to MS-13, which the Trump administration designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The deportation came despite Abrego Garcia being granted a withholding of removal order due to claims that he feared for his life in El Salvador. The Trump administration has admitted Abrego Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error,” but affirmed the belief that he is a member of MS-13. This was further evidenced with the release of a 2019 arrest report for Garcia.
Following his removal, a US district court ruled that the government must take steps to return Abrego Garcia so that he could receive due process, as he was improperly deported due to the withholding order. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the lower court’s authority to issue that order, but did not define the extent to which the administration must “facilitate” his return.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to Van Hollen’s trip with strong criticism.
"It's appalling and sad that Senator Chris 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. “Nobody knows this more than the woman standing to my right, Patty Morin, whose beautiful daughter Rachel was brutally maimed and murdered at the hands of an illegal alien in August of 2023." Morin said she has never been contacted by Van Hollen's office, though she and her dead daughter are among his contituents.
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