Sen. from Maryland Chris Van Hollen followed his promise to travel to El Salvador To check a wrongly deported manKilmar Abrego Garcia.
Van Hollen swore to visit the country in the middle of the week If the United States government has not obeyed an order from the Supreme Court to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego GarciaA 29 -year -old Maryland resident and the father of three children who was expelled last month.
Learn more: The American senator says he goes to Salvador if Trump will not be wrong
Addressing journalists at the airport on Wednesday morning, Van Hollen said that Greo Garcia had been “illegally torn from the streets”, calling the situation that the Trump administration has created for everyone in the country “a nightmare”.
“It is a very short route to tyranny,” he added.
The American senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) speaks to the media alongside union leaders and workers outside the headquarters of the staff management office (OPM) on March 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. The workers gathered to protest the recent cuts made to the department by the Ministry of Elon Musk’s government efficiency (DOGE).
Katopodis / Getty Images Tasos
During his visit, Van Hollen told journalists that he intended to verify the well-being of Abrego Garcia, to report on his state and to speak with senior government officials in Salvador.
Van Hollen was in communication with the Embassy of Salvador, but said that he would understand a better understanding of whom he will be able to meet once he arrives.
It is not clear if he can see Abrego Garcia in person.
“My general objective here is to send a signal that we are not going to stop fighting for his return until he is really released,” said Van Hollen, adding that he has promised to the family of the man he will do everything in his power to guarantee his return safely.
Get national news
For news that has an impact on Canada and worldwide, register for the safeguarding of news alerts that are delivered to you directly when they occur.
“I may be the first senator or first member of the Congress to descend to Salvador, but people will continue to come until he returns home,” he continued.
Van Hollen’s visit comes a few days after the American president Donald Trump met the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, in the Oval office on Monday.
Before the presidential public on Monday, Van Hollen wrote to the El Salvador ambassador urgently asking for a meeting with Bukele.
“I met the wife, mother and brother of Mr. Abrego Garcia, and, as you can imagine, they are extremely worried about her health, security and his pursuit of illegal confinement, like me,” he wrote in a letter dated April 13.
We don’t know if Van Hollen and Bukele met.
During Trump and Bukele’s conversation, Bukele argued that he did not have the power to return Abrego Garcia, saying that it would be “absurd” to “pass a terrorist smuggling in the United States”.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration said its return to the United States was up to Salvador.
In his decision on April 10The Supreme Court said that “the United States acknowledges that Greo Garcia was subject to a restraint order prohibiting his referral to El Salvador, and that the referral to El Salvador was therefore illegal.”
“The order properly requires that the government” facilitates “the liberation of Abrego Garcia de la Garde in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is treated as he would have been if he had been badly sent to El Salvador.”
Before his flight Wednesday morning, Van Hollen accused the Trump administration of relying on the most vulnerable populations in the country and criticized his blatant contempt for judicial orders and the rule of law.
“He is a person who is legally here. He was never even charged in a criminal case. He was never sentenced in a criminal case. So when the vice-president tweets, he was condemned, it is simply not true. Said Hollen.
Van Hollen referred to a post X produced by US vice-president JD Vance on Tuesday.
“When the media and the extreme left are obsessed with a member of the Gang MS-13 and demand that it be returned to the United States for a third * expulsion audience, what they really say is that they want the vast majority of illegal foreigners to remain permanently,” wrote Vance.
On Wednesday, American district judge James Boasberg found a probable cause that the The Trump Administration acted as a court in court When he challenged his order to transform two planes carrying alleged members of Venezuelan gangs – including Abredo Garcia – in Salvador.
“The Constitution does not tolerate the voluntary disobedience of judicial orders – in particular by the officials of a branch of coordinates who took an oath to maintain it,” Boasberg wrote in a Memorandum opinion.
“To allow these officials to” freely cancel the judgments of the United States courts “would not” destroy the rights acquired under these judgments “; It would make “a solemn mockery” of “the constitution itself”, he continued.
Before his illegal detention, the United States government admitted was “administrative error“, While saying that he was a member of a gang, Abrego Garcia had resided in the United States for 14 years after fled illegally in 2011 at the age of 16 to escape the persecution of the gangs in El Salvador.
He was arrested by the county police in 2019 before being held by immigration and the application of customs (ICE) when the authorities thought he was a member of the Gang MS-13, an assertion that Grego Garcia Nie. His lawyers say he has never been accused of a crime.
Abrego Garcia later declared an immigration judge that he would ask for asylum and asked to be released.
However, there was enough verified information connecting it to an MS-13 chapter in New York, where he had never lived, to keep it behind bars.
In prison, Abrego Garcia married his long -term girlfriend, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who was five months in a high -risk pregnancy at the time; She gave birth when he was in prison.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wife, who was wrongly expelled to Salvador, left the Federal Court on April 15, 2025, in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Katopodis / Getty Images Tasos
In October 2019, an immigration judge rejected Abrego Garcia’s asylum request, but granted him protection against the return to El Salvador due to a “well -founded fear” of the persecution of the gangs, as case.
He was released and Ice did not appeal.
Abrego Garcia registered with ICE each year and the Ministry of Internal Security issued him a work permit, said his lawyers in legal files. He joined a union and was employed full time as an apprentice in a sheet metal.
Abrego Garcia was on one of the three high -level flights to El Salvador on March 15 carrying members of alleged gangs, many of whom had no criminal record.
He is currently detained at the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOC), a notoriously dangerous prison housing hundreds of members of alleged gangs.
– with files from the Associated Press