The Maryland context
From Maryland Matters
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said repeatedly during his trip to El Salvador this week that while he may have been the first member of Congress to go there to press the case of deported Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, he would not be the last. Sure enough, Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-4th), whose district includes Abrego Garcia's home of Beltsville, said he will travel to El Salvador next month to "do a welfare check on my constituent." Ivey also led a dozen House Democrats who wrote to President Donald Trump on Friday, urging him to comply with last week's Supreme Court order and "get Mr. Abrego Garcia back to his family in the Unted Sates as quickly as possible,"
This story was updated at 6:01 p.m. Eastern.
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident the Trump administration erroneously deported to his native El Salvador, appeared to be in good health and had been moved from a notorious mega-prison to another detention center, as his case tests the limits of executive power to override due process rights in the United States, Sen. Chris Van Hollen told reporters Friday.
Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, met Thursday with Abrego Garcia and briefed reporters on the visit after landing Friday afternoon at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C.
The meeting with Van Hollen was Abrego Garcia’s first contact outside of the U.S. and El Salvador immigration and legal systems since he was deported in March, the senator said.
“His conversation with me was the first communication he’d had with anybody outside a prison since he was abducted,” Van Hollen said Friday.
U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen speaks at a press conference at Dulles International Airport on Friday, April 18, 2025. (Image via Van Hollen YouTube channel livestream).
Accompanied by Abrego Garcia’s wife, mother and brother at Dulles, Van Hollen said he’d been preparing to catch his plane out of El Salvador Thursday evening when he got word from the U.S. embassy that he would be able to meet with Abrego Garcia.
The meeting came at the end of Van Hollen’s second day in the country, where he faced difficulties securing an in-person meeting or phone call with the Salvadoran citizen. The second-term senator traveled to the Central American country this week to urge the Salvadoran government to release Abrego Garcia and to meet with him.
Abrego Garcia told Van Hollen he’d been taken to a detention center in Baltimore, Van Hollen said Friday. From there, he was transported to Texas and then flown to El Salvador, where he was detained at the notorious mega-prison Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT.
Abrego Garcia was moved on April 9 from CECOT to another El Salvador detention center, Van Hollen reported. The conditions at the new prison were better, but Abrego Garcia was still denied access to the outside world, including communication with his family or lawyers, which is a violation of international law, Van Hollen said.
The meeting occurred under close supervision from Salvadoran officials, Van Hollen said, but Abrego Garcia appeared in adequate health.
“On a very cursory examination, he appeared OK,” Van Hollen said.
Van Hollen on Thursday shared a picture on social media of his meeting with Abrego Garcia, who appeared in civilian clothes.
Constitutional conflict
While he said Abrego Garcia’s individual case was tragic, Van Hollen said it had even larger implications for the strength of constitutional rights to due process.
“This should not be an issue for Republicans or Democrats,” he said. “This is an issue for every American who cares about our Constitution, who cares about personal liberty, who cares about due process and who cares about what makes America so different, which is adherence to all of those things. This is an American issue.”
Noting that the administration has ignored federal courts at every level — including a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week that President Donald Trump’s administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States — Van Hollen said officials at the U.S. embassy in El Salvador told him they had not received any instruction from the administration to seek his release.
“It’s very clear that the president, the Trump administration, are blatantly, flagrantly disagreeing with, defying, the order from the Supreme Court,” he said.
White House says ‘he’s NOT coming back’
The Trump administration, which has admitted in court that Abrego Garcia’s deportation stemmed from an “administrative error,” continued Friday to be steadfast in refusing to return him.
The Trump administration has criticized Van Hollen’s advocacy for Abrego Garcia, and the White House targeted the senator on social media Friday.
“Oh, and by the way, @ChrisVanHollen — he’s NOT coming back,” a post on X from the official White House account read. The post included an illustration of a New York Times headline on the meeting, with two sections crossed out and replaced with administration claims about Abrego Garcia.
The administration has claimed there are logistical reasons it cannot repatriate Abrego Garcia, but some — including a Reagan-appointed federal appeals court judge on Thursday — have said the executive branch is defying the Supreme Court order.
Payments to El Salvador
Van Hollen said the Trump administration has promised to pay El Salvador up to $15 million to detain the prisoners, but noted that Democrats in the U.S. Senate are not “totally powerless” to stop those payments.
“Appropriations need to go through the Congress, and that $15 million, you can be sure we’re going to be looking for where it is because that wasn’t authorized in previous appropriations,” he said.
He said that while Democrats are in the minority in both houses of Congress, they could block any Senate funding bill that included payments for detention in El Salvador.
“You can be sure that I won’t support the use of one penny of taxpayer dollars to keep Abrego Garcia illegally detained in El Salvador,” he said.
Shauneen Miranda is a reporter for States Newsroom’s Washington bureau. An alumna of the University of Maryland, she previously covered breaking news for Axios.
Maryland Matters is a trusted nonprofit and nonpartisan news site. We are not the arm of a profit-seeking corporation. Nor do we have a paywall — we want to keep our work open to as many people as possible. So we rely on the generosity of individuals and foundations to fund our work.
Years ago, healthy competition for news out of Annapolis and across the state produced robust coverage. But the media landscape has changed. Newspapers have closed. Suburban bureaus have shut down. Reporting staffs have shrunk. Coverage of state and local news has all but disappeared. Maryland Matters seeks to fill the void with original reporting and commentary.
