U.S. senator keeps word, goes to El Salvador to check on wrongly deported man – National
Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen has followed through on his promise to travel to El Salvador to check up on a wrongly deported man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Van Hollen vowed to visit the country by midweek if the U.S. government failed to obey a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Maryland resident and father of three who was deported last month.
READ MORE: U.S. senator says he’s travelling to El Salvador if Trump won’t return wrongfully deported man
Speaking to reporters at the airport on Wednesday morning, Van Hollen said Abrego Garcia was “illegally snatched off the streets,” calling the situation the Trump administration has created for everyone in the country “a nightmare.”
“It’s a very short road to tyranny,” he added.
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
During his visit, Van Hollen told reporters that he intends to check on Abrego Garcia’s well-being, report on his condition and speak with senior government officials in El Salvador.
Van Hollen has been in communication with the Salvadoran embassy, but said he will gain a better understanding of who he will be able to meet with once he arrives.
It remains unclear if he will be able to see Abrego Garcia in person.
“My overall purpose here is to send a signal that we are not going to stop fighting for his return until he is actually released,” Van Hollen said, adding that he has promised the man’s family he will do everything within his power to secure his safe return.
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“I may be the first senator or first member of Congress to go down to El Salvador, but people are gonna keep on coming until he comes home,” he continued.
Van Hollen’s visit comes days after U.S. President Donald Trump met with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, in the Oval Office on Monday.
Ahead of Monday’s presidential audience, Van Hollen wrote to the El Salvador ambassador urgently requesting a meeting with Bukele.
“I have met with Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife, mother, and brother, and, as you can imagine, they are extremely worried about his health, safety, and continued illegal confinement, as am I,” he wrote in a letter dated April 13.
It’s not known if Van Hollen and Bukele met.
During Trump and Bukele’s conversation, 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.
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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