Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen said on Thursday night that he had met in San Salvador with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man whose wrongful deportation to El Salvador last month has become a flashpoint in the immigration debate and fuelled a standoff between the Trump administration and the courts.
Van Hollen, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, shared a photograph of the two men speaking on Thursday evening, hours after the senator had been denied entry to the prison where Abrego Garcia was being held.
The unexpected meeting took place at a hotel in San Salvador, according to photographs shared by the senator’s office late on Thursday. In the images, Abrego Garcia was dressed in plain clothes and sat for a conversation with Van Hollen. El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele said on social media that Abrego Garcia would remain in his country’s custody.
The photographs shared by Van Hollen and others posted by Bukele were the first public glimpses of Abrego Garcia since his deportation in March, which the Trump administration admitted in court was an error. The US supreme court has ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return, but a federal judge overseeing the case has scolded the government for doing “nothing” to comply.
“Our purpose today was very straightforward,” Van Hollen said in an interview on Thursday, before the meeting with Abrego Garcia. “It was simply to be able to go see if Kilmar Abrego Garcia is doing okay. I mean, nobody has heard anything about his condition since he was illegally abducted from the United States. He is totally beyond reach.”
Van Hollen had initially been stopped by the Salvadoran military officials when he tried to visit Abrego Garcia, and described the encounter as a blockade intended to thwart his visit to the prison. Human rights advocates have documented overcrowding in El Salvador’s prisons and reports of torture.
“This was a very sort of simple humanitarian request,” Van Hollen said soon after the stop.
The photographs of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia conveyed a very different atmosphere from scenes of the crowded prison, with the two sitting together at a table in a dining area near lush greenery and greeting each other on the polished floor of the hotel lobby.
Bukele, in a social media post, even crowed that “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture,’” was “now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” But according to a person familiar with the situation, a Bukele aide placed the two glasses with cherries and salted rims on the table in front of Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia in the middle of their meeting in an attempt to stage the photo.
In his post, Van Hollen said he had called Abrego Garcia’s wife, who has publicly pleaded for his return, after the meeting “to pass along his message of love”.
Van Hollen’s visit underscored a broader Democratic effort to spotlight the case of Abrego Garcia, placing his detention at the centre of their efforts to challenge the Trump administration’s approach. News of Van Hollen’s meeting Thursday evening had not deterred other Democratic lawmakers who had said they, too, intended to travel to the country to advocate for his release.
“This is an example of the much bigger challenge, no doubt about it,” Van Hollen said of the case of Abrego Garcia, who had been living in Maryland under an immigration judge’s order that granted him protections from deportation. “Because my view is when you start picking on the most vulnerable people, and you push and push and push, and you get away with it, then you take the next bite.”
In exchange for El Salvador’s detention of the deported immigrants, Bukele has said he is being paid $6 million by the US government.
In social media post on Thursday after Van Hollen’s visit with Abrego Garcia, Bukele said that “now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”
A spokesperson for the presidency of El Salvador, Wendy Ramos, did not respond to requests for comment.
At the White House on Thursday afternoon, when asked by a reporter whether he would move to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, Trump said: “Well, I’m not involved.”
“You’ll have to speak to the lawyers, the DOJ,” he said, referring to the justice department.
Beyond seeking assurances of Abrego Garcia’s safety, Van Hollen’s trip has brought additional attention to the case. Abrego Garcia’s deportation and imprisonment have become the most prominent example for both advocates and critics of the Trump administration’s stance on immigration.
For many Democrats, Van Hollen’s stand represented a defence of human rights and legal access. For conservatives, it was a misguided gesture of sympathy for a man who, as the White House has repeatedly noted, had entered the US illegally.
“It’s appalling and sad that senator 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,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said at a briefing on Wednesday afternoon.
She was joined in the briefing room by Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a Maryland resident who was brutally murdered in 2023 by an immigrant from El Salvador. The administration has pointed to Morin’s death as an example to justify its stance on immigration, although statistics show immigrants are less likely than US-born citizens to commit crimes.
Van Hollen acknowledged Morin’s tragic death and reaffirmed his commitment to combating gang violence, which he said was a rare point of agreement with Salvadoran officials during his meetings this week. But he rejected the equivalence implied by Trump officials.
“My argument here all along in this is that he just requires due process,” Van Hollen said of Abrego Garcia. “My argument is not that I claim to know all the facts here. My whole argument is we have a court where the whole purpose of having a hearing was for people to present their evidence.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
