Maryland dad Abrego Garcia moved out of brutal El Salvador jail but remains behind bars, says senator who met with him
A Salvadoran father living in Maryland was moved out of a brutal jail in his home country after Donald Trump’s administration wrongfully deported him there, according to Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen who managed to visit him in El Salvador.
During his last day in El Salvador to check on the welfare of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose removal from the country is facing intense legal scrutiny and urgent court orders for the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return to the United States, the Maryland senator briefly met with the Maryland dad at his hotel.
There, Abrego Garcia told Van Hollen that he was moved from the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, to a facility in Santa Ana, roughly 60 kilometers away.
News of Van Hollen’s surprise meeting with Abrego Garcia on Thursday night was preempted by El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, who shared a picture on social media showing the men sitting at a table with glasses dressed up like cocktails.
“Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ [and] ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” Bukele wrote. “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”
Those “margaritas” were placed on the table by Bukele’s aides, Van Hollen said.
“When I first sat down we just had glasses of water on the table, maybe some coffee,” he said. “As we were talking, [an] official came over and put two other glasses on the table … This is a lesson, the lengths President Bukele would do to deceive people about what’s going on.”
Bukele’s aides initially tried to stage the meeting near the hotel’s pool, according to Van Hollen.
“They want to create this appearance that life was just lovely for Kilmar, which of course is a big, fat lie,” Van Hollen said at a news conference at Washington Dulles International Airport Friday on his return from El Salvador,.
Van Hollen said Abrego Garcia’s experiences snatched from his home to be incarcerated in a foreign prison have been traumatizing.
“His conversation with me was the first communication he’d had with anybody outside of prison since he was abducted,” Van Hollen said. He has “experienced trauma,” said the senator, who noted that Abrego Garcia characterized his deportation as an “illegal abduction.”
Van Hollen said Abrego Garcia told him he was “okay,” and had been able to see a doctor for a “blood pressure condition.”
Images and descriptions of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia are the first accounts of his wellbeing since he was removed from the United States on March 15. He has spent more than a month inside El Salvador jails despite a court order from an immigration judge in 2019 that prevents his removal from the country for humanitarian reasons. He fled El Salvador as a teenager in 2011 and is now a sheet-metal apprentice in Maryland, where he has been living with his wife and 5-year-old child, both U.S. citizens. The couple is also raising two other children from a previous relationship.
“When I told him his wife and family sent their love and were fighting for Kilmar to return every day, he said he was worried about all of you,” said Van Hollen, addressing Abrego Garcia’s family.
Abrego Garcia “was placed in a cell … with about 25 other prisoners” when he arrived at CECOT, Van Hollen said.
“He said he was not afraid of the other prisoners in his immediate cell, but that he was traumatized by being at CECOT and fearful of many of the prisoners in other cell blocks who called out to him and taunted him in various ways,” he said.
But roughly nine days ago, Abrego Garcia was moved to another detention center in Santa Ana.
“We all thought he was at CECOT until I met with him,” Van Hollen said.
The White House and Republican lawmakers have blasted the senator for his trip to El Salvador while administration officials seek to justify Abrego Garcia’s removal from the country introducing spurious allegations of criminality against him, none of which have been submitted in court.
“That is who the Democrat Party is going to provide aid, solace and comfort to?” White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller told reporters on Friday. “How broken is that man’s heart, how broken is his conscience? … His heart is reserved for an illegal alien who’s a member of a foreign terrorist organization. I am beyond appalled.”
An intelligence memo prepared for Homeland Security and dated April 17 alleges that Abrego Garcia was “suspected of labor/human trafficking” over a traffic stop in 2022. He was driving a car with several other passengers and received a warning citation from a highway patrol officer for driving with an expired license. He has never been convicted or charged with trafficking.
Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig told CNN the evidence is “no smoking gun.”
“The most important point here is the police let him go,” said Honig, calling it a “huge leap to go from the facts we have to this man is a human trafficker.”
Officials have also labeled Abrego Garcia a “leader” of MS-13, but the allegation rests on a statement from an unnamed police informant in 2019. The informant reportedly claimed Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13’s “Westerns” clique, which operates out of New York, where Abrego Garcia has never lived.
Abrego Garcia, his family and attorneys have flatly rejected the allegations.
Administration officials have also sought to justify his removal and detention by pointing to a protective order filed by his wife in 2021. His wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura dissolved the order a month later.
“Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process,” she said in a statement to CNN Wednesday. “We were able to work through this situation privately as a family, including by going to counseling. Our marriage only grew stronger in the years that followed. No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect.”
The order does not justify federal agents “abducting him and deporting him to a country where he was supposed to be protected from deportation,” she added. “Kilmar has always been a loving partner and father, and I will continue to stand by him and demand justice for him.”
Administration officials have also accused Van Hollen of failing to advocate for the victims of violent crime committed by immigrants. During an emotional appearance at the White House this week, the mother of Rachel Morin accused the senator of failing to acknowledge her daughter’s murder.
“My response is that my heart goes out to the family of Rachel,” Van Hollen said Friday. “I am very glad that a court of law convicted her killer and is going to punish her killer in a court of law. The reason we have courts of law … is to punish the guilty, but also to make sure that those who have not committed crimes are not found guilty and arbitrarily detained.”
He said the administration’s attempts to “conflate the issues goes to the heart of what I talked about.”
The case is “not just about one man,” Van Hollen said.
“As the federal courts have said, we need to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia home to protect his constitutional rights to due process,” he said. “If you deny the constitutional rights of one man, you threaten the constitutional rights and due process for everyone else.”
The Trump administration “wants to flat-out lie about what this is about,” he added. “They want to change the subject. They want to make it about something else, and they are flouting the orders … to ‘facilitate’ his return.”
Last week, the Supreme Court ordered the administration to “facilitate” his “release from custody in El Salvador,” noting that officials agreed sending him there was “illegal.”
On Thursday, a three-judge federal appeals court panel in Washington, D.C., stated that the “government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.”
“‘Facilitate’ is an active verb,” Ronald Reagan-appointed appellate judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote. “It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear.”
