U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Wednesday he was denied access to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man mistakenly deported and being held in a notorious gang prison in El Salvador, during a meeting with the country’s vice president.
The Maryland senator vowed to visit the country by midweek if the U.S. government failed to obey a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Maryland resident and father of three who was deported last month.
Van Hollen, who is a member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said at a news conference in San Salvador after the meeting that Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa told him he could not authorize a visit or a call with Abrego Garcia.
He said Ulloa had also told him El Salvador was not releasing Abrego Garcia because the U.S. government was paying to keep him incarcerated, and would not provide evidence of criminal wrongdoing or that Abrego Garcia is a gang member.
“Why should the government of the United States pay the government of El Salvador to lock up a man who was illegally abducted from the United States?” Van Hollen said.
“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? They should just let him go.”
The Trump administration and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said earlier this week that they have no basis to send Abrego Garcia back, even after the U.S. Supreme Court called on the administration to help bring him home.
The high court upheld an order by Judge Paula Xinis directing the government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return.
On Tuesday, Xinis said she would not immediately hold the government in contempt of court, but said there was no evidence the Trump administration had tried to retrieve Abrego Garcia and said she would not tolerate “gamesmanship or grandstanding.”
Trump officials have said that Abrego Garcia has ties to the MS-13 gang, but his attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of that and Abrego Garcia has disputed that claim. He has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.
“We have an unjust situation here,” Van Hollen said Wednesday. “The Trump administration is lying about Abrego Garcia. The American courts have looked at the facts.”
U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) speaks to the media alongside union leaders and workers outside the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) headquarters on March 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. Workers gathered to protest recent cuts made to the department by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images
Later on Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lambasted Van Hollen for his taxpayer-funded trip to El Salvador and Democrats who have voiced support, and renewed claims that Abrego Garcia was a gang member.
She also read out claims of domestic abuse filed against Abrego Garcia she said were presented in Maryland court proceedings on his case Wednesday.
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Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Abrego Garcia’s wife, later addressed these domestic abuse claims with the media, saying she acted out of precaution due to past experience in an abusive relationship.
“After surviving domestic violence in a previous relationship, I acted out of caution after a disagreement with Kilmar by seeking a protective order in case things escalated,” she said.
“We were able to work through this situation privately as a family, including by going to counselling,” Vasquez Sura said. “Kilmar has always been a loving partner and father, and I will continue to stand by him and demand justice for him.”
Leavitt was joined in the White House briefing room by Patty Morin, a Maryland woman who described in graphic detail her daughter Rachel’s rape and murder by an El Salvador fugitive, who was convicted Monday for the 2023 crime.
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“To have a senator from Maryland who barely acknowledged my daughter and the brutal death she endured … use my taxpayer money to fly to El Salvador to bring back somebody that is not even an American citizen — why does that person have more right than I do, or my daughter, or my grandchildren?” she asked.
Some Republicans have planned trips to 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.
During Trump and Bukele’s conversation in the Oval Office on Monday, Bukele argued he lacked the power to return Abrego Garcia, saying it would be “preposterous” to “smuggle a terrorist into the United States.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration said his return to the U.S. was up to El Salvador.
In its ruling on April 10, the Supreme Court said that “The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal.”
“The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”
Ahead of his flight on Wednesday morning, Van Hollen accused the Trump administration of picking on the country’s most vulnerable populations and criticized his flagrant disregard for court orders and the rule of law.
“This is a person who is here legally. He has never been even charged in a criminal case. He’s never been convicted in a criminal case. So, when the vice-president tweets out he’s been convicted, that’s just not true. I mean, you saw lie after lie after lie coming out of the White House. They’re gaslighting the American people on this case, so they can say what they want, but in the United States of America, at least so far, we respect the rule of law,” Van Hollen said.
Van Hollen was referring to an X post made by U.S. Vice-President JD Vance on Tuesday.
“When the media and the far left obsess over an MS-13 gang member and demand that he be returned to the United States for a *third* deportation hearing, what they’re really saying is they want the vast majority of illegal aliens to stay here permanently,” Vance wrote.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg found probable cause that the Trump administration acted in contempt of court when it defied his order to turn around two planes carrying alleged Venezuelan gang members — including Abrego Garcia — to El Salvador.
“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders — especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” Boasberg wrote in a memorandum opinion.
“To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself, ‘” he continued.
Why was Abrego Garcia deported?
Before his illegal detention, which the U.S government admitted was an “administrative error,” while claiming that he was a gang member, Abrego Garcia had resided in the U.S. for 14 years after fleeing there illegally in 2011 at the age of 16 to escape gang persecution in El Salvador.
He was arrested by county police in 2019 before being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as authorities believed he was a member of the MS-13 gang, a claim Abrego Garcia denies. His lawyers say he has never been charged with a crime.
Abrego Garcia later told an immigration judge he would seek asylum and requested to be released.
However, there was enough verified information allegedly connecting him to an MS-13 chapter in New York, where he had never lived, to keep him behind bars.
While in prison, Abrego Garcia married his long-term girlfriend, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who was five months into a high-risk pregnancy at the time; she gave birth while he was in jail.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, leaves Federal Court on April 15, 2025, in Greenbelt, Md. The Trump administration admits Abrego Garcia was deported accidentally, but has not yet acted on a judge’s order to facilitate his return to the U.S.
Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images
In October 2019, an immigration judge denied Abrego Garcia’s asylum request but granted him protection from being deported back to El Salvador because of a “well-founded fear” of gang persecution, according to his case.
He was released, and ICE did not appeal.
Abrego Garcia checked in with ICE yearly and the Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, his lawyers said in court filings. He joined a union and was employed full-time as a sheet metal apprentice.
Abrego Garcia was on one of three high-profile flights to El Salvador on March 15 carrying alleged gang members, many of whom did not have criminal records.
He is currently detained at the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a notoriously dangerous prison housing hundreds of alleged gang members.
— With files from The Associated Press
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