Senator Who Met With Wrongly Deported Man Gives Update On His Condition

A Maryland resident who has been imprisoned in El Salvador since the Trump administration mistakenly deported him there last month is “traumatized” by the experience, according to a U.S. senator who met with him Thursday.

“He said he felt very sad about being in a prison because he had not committed any crimes,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told reporters upon returning Friday to the U.S. at Washington Dulles International Airport.

“This case is not just about one man. It’s about protecting the constitutional rights of everybody that resides in the United States of America,” Van Hollen added, slamming the Trump administration for defying court orders on the matter.

Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador earlier this week to visit the 29-year-old Salvadoran citizen, who was erroneously sent to El Salvador despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation. He said the Trump administration violated his due process rights and called for his return.

The U.S. Supreme Court in a unanimous ruling also told the Trump administration to facilitate his return, but so far it has refused. It maintains Abrego Garcia is a gang member, an allegation his lawyers have denied.

El Salvador officials initially stonewalled Van Hollen, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and told him that a meeting with Abrego Garcia wasn’t possible. On Thursday, however, Van Hollen finally got a chance to sit down with him, sharing a photo of the meeting on social media.

“I was getting ready to catch a plane back to the U.S., when all of a sudden, I got word that I would be allowed to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia. They brought him to the hotel where I was staying,” Van Hollen said Friday.

Abrego Garcia told Van Hollen he was moved from CECOT, the notorious maximum security prison he was initially taken to, to another detention center in Santa Ana last week where the conditions are better, but where he still has no access to the outside.

Van Hollen also said that El Salvador officials staged a photo of his meeting to make it appear as if the senator and Abrego Garcia were enjoying margaritas at his hotel. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele claimed in posts on social media he was “sipping margaritas” with the senator “in the tropical paradise of El Salvador.”

But neither Van Hollen nor Abrego Garcia ordered a margarita.

“When I first sat down with Kilmar, we just had glasses of water on the table,” Van Hollen said. “As we were at the table, one of the government people came over and deposited two other glasses on the table with ice and salt or sugar. They looked like margaritas. Neither of us touched the drinks that were in front of us.”

Abrego Garcia’s deportation has set off alarm bells about the continued deterioration of the rule of law in the United States.

On Thursday, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to appeal a court order directing it to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia.

“It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, wrote in the decision. “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. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

He added that he and his two colleagues on the court “cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos.”