Van Hollen meets with detained Maryland man in El Salvador

John Harney and Eric Martin, Bloomberg News on Apr 17, 2025

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U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen has met with a Maryland man in El Salvador who had been deported in an “administrative error” to the Central American country by the Trump administration and detained in a mega prison.

Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, on Thursday posted a photo of him with the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, on the X social media platform.

“I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return,” Van Hollen wrote.

He didn’t say where the encounter took place. In the photo, they’re sitting at what looks like a restaurant table, with Abrego Garcia wearing civilian clothes and not the outfits associated with El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center.

Van Hollen’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment made Thursday night after office hours.

The fate of Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant, who was deported on March 15 despite a 2019 court order saying he couldn’t be sent to back to his native country, has led to a confrontation between the Trump administration and the judiciary, which has said he must be brought back to the US.

In Maryland this week, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis admonished a Justice Department lawyer for failing to say how the government was facilitating his return.

Earlier Thursday, a U.S. appeals court denied an emergency motion by the Trump administration to halt Xinis’s effort, saying the Justice Department’s conduct was shocking to Americans’ “sense of liberty.”

During a meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Monday, El Salvador’s leader, Nayib Bukele, told reporters that he didn’t “have the power” to return him to the U.S.

Bukele has been aiding Trump’s efforts to escalate deportations of migrants by taking in alleged gang members. Trump and others in his administration claim that Abrego Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang, which his lawyers deny.

Bukele on Thursday commented sarcastically on social media about the case and the senator’s visit, posting that Abrego Garcia had “miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’.”

“Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody,” Bukele wrote in a post on X.