Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, right, speaks with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who was living in Maryland and deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration, in a hotel restaurant in San Salvador, El Salvador, Thursday, April 17, 2025.

American Senator Chris Van Hollen said on Thursday, April 18, he had met with a Salvadoran man wrongfully deported to his home country by the Trump administration, in a case that has sparked outrage in the United States. Van Hollen had earlier said he had been denied access to the prison where Washington has paid President Nayib Bukele millions to lock up nearly 300 migrants it says are criminals and gang members – including 29-year-old Kilmar Abrego Garcia. “I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance,” Van Hollen later posted on X with a photo of him sitting at what appeared to be a restaurant table with Abrego Garcia.

The dour-faced deportee is shown wearing a short-sleeved check shirt and a baseball cap. Van Hollen added that he would offer “a full update upon my return” to the US. Abrego Garcia was detained in Maryland last month and expelled to El Salvador along with 238 Venezuelans and 22 fellow Salvadorans who were deported shortly after President Donald Trump invoked a rarely-used wartime authority.

Trump administration officials have claimed he is an illegal migrant, a gang member and involved in human trafficking, without providing evidence. Abrego Garcia had enjoyed a protected status in the US, precluding his deportation to El Salvador for his own safety. A federal judge has since ordered that he be returned, later backed up by the Supreme Court. But the administration – despite admitting an “administrative error” in his deportation – contends he is now solely in Salvadoran custody.

‘Staying in El Salvador’

Bukele, who met Trump in Washington on Monday, said he does not have the power to send the man back. The Salvadoran leader posted to X late Thursday that Abrego Garcia was “sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador.” The deportee in fact appeared to have a cup of coffee and glass of water on the table in front of him. “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody,” Bukele added in another post.

Van Hollen, on the second day of his trip to El Salvador, had earlier tried to make his way to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) outside the capital San Salvador to see Abrego Garcia. The car he was traveling in was stopped by soldiers, he said, about three kilometers from the complex holding thousands of Salvadoran gangsters, and now also hundreds of migrants expelled from the United States. “We were told by the soldiers that they had been ordered not to allow us to proceed,” the senator later told reporters.

Le Monde with AFP

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