About a mile and a half from a maximum-security Salvadoran prison on Thursday, Senator Chris Van Hollen’s caravan was brought to an abrupt halt by a military roadblock.
Mr. Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had made the final stop of his visit to El Salvador, where he had hoped to meet with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man whose unlawful deportation last month has become a flashpoint in the debate over U.S. immigration policy.
Mr. Van Hollen and Chris Newman, a lawyer representing Mr. Abrego Garcia, were denied their request to visit the prison, known as CECOT, and forced to turn back. The refusal of entry came a day after El Salvador’s vice president rejected Mr. Van Hollen’s formal appeal for a meeting or even a phone call with Mr. Abrego Garcia.
“Our purpose today was very straightforward,” Mr. Van Hollen said in an interview on Thursday. “It was simply to be able to go see if Kilmar Abrego Garcia is doing OK. I mean, nobody has heard anything about his condition since he was illegally abducted from the United States. He is totally beyond reach.”
After being stopped by the Salvadoran military officials, Mr. Van Hollen described the encounter as a blockade intended to thwart his visit to the prison. Human rights advocates have documented overcrowding in El Salvador’s prisons and reports of torture.
“This was a very sort of simple humanitarian request,” Mr. Van Hollen said soon after the stop. “They said they were ordered not to allow us to proceed any further.”
The refusal to allow entry to a U.S. senator — days after several Republican members of Congress were given tours of the prison — was a remarkable escalation of the showdown over President Trump’s hard-line immigration policy. Mr. Van Hollen’s visit underscores a broader Democratic effort to spotlight the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, placing his detention at the center of their efforts to challenge the Trump administration’s approach.
“This is an example of the much bigger challenge, no doubt about it,” Mr. Van Hollen said of the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, who had been living in Maryland under a federal judge’s order that granted him protections from deportation. “Because my view is when you start picking on the most vulnerable people, and you push and push and push, and you get away with it, then you take the next bite.”
The Trump administration, in concert with the government of President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, has in effect made immigrants sent to the prison disappear.
In exchange for holding the detainees, Mr. Bukele has said he is being paid $6 million by the U.S. government. A spokeswoman for the Salvadoran presidency, Wendy Ramos, did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Van Hollen’s remarks.
At the White House on Thursday afternoon, when asked by a reporter whether he would move to return Mr. Abrego Garcia to the United States, Mr. Trump said, “Well, I’m not involved.”
“You’ll have to speak to the lawyers, the D.O.J.,” he said, referring to the Justice Department.
Although a group of armed military officials kept Mr. Van Hollen from seeing the man who was deported from his state on Thursday, his trip succeeded in drawing additional attention to Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case. His deportation and imprisonment has become the most prominent example for both advocates and critics of the Trump administration’s stance on immigration.
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For many Democrats, Mr. Van Hollen’s stand represented a defense of human rights and legal access. For conservatives, it was a misguided gesture of sympathy for a man who, as the White House has repeatedly noted, had entered the U.S. illegally.
“It’s appalling and sad that Senator Van Hollen and the Democrats applauding his trip to El Salvador today are incapable of having any shred of common sense or empathy for their own constituents,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said at a briefing on Wednesday afternoon.
She was joined in the briefing room by Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a Maryland resident who was brutally murdered in 2023 by an immigrant from El Salvador. The administration has pointed to Ms. Morin’s death as an example to justify its stance on immigration, though statistics show immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born citizens to commit crimes.
Mr. Van Hollen acknowledged Ms. Morin’s tragic death and reaffirmed his commitment to combating gang violence, which he said was a rare point of agreement with Salvadoran officials during his meetings this week. But he rejected the equivalence implied by Trump officials.
“My argument here all along in this is that he just requires due process,” Mr. Van Hollen said of Mr. Abrego Garcia. “My argument is not that I claim to know all the facts here. My whole argument is we have a court where the whole purpose of having a hearing was for people to present their evidence.”
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