Senator Chris Van Hollen set the record straight Friday on the shameless lies about his meeting with the Maryland man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
During a press conference, Van Hollen put to rest right-wing rumors started by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who claimed that Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia were “sipping margaritas” and shared a photo on X of the two men at a table with drinks topped with maraschino cherries.
The Maryland Democrat said that when they sat down to talk at his hotel, “one of the government people came over and deposited two other glasses on the table with ice, and I don’t know if it was salt or sugar around the top, but they looked like margaritas.”
“If you look at the one they put in front of Kilmar, it actually had a little less liquid than the one in front of me, to try to make it look, I assume, like he drank out of it,” Van Hollen said.
“Let me just be very clear, neither of us touched the drinks that were in front of us. And if you want to play a little Sherlock Holmes, I’ll tell you how you could know that,” he continued.
Van Hollen explained that if either of the men had sipped from the cups, there would be a gap in the dressing around the rims.
“There’s no gap. Nobody drank any margaritas or sugar water or whatever it is,” he said. “But this is a lesson. It’s the lengths that President Bukele will do to deceive people about what’s going on.”
Van Hollen said that when Donald Trump was asked later Friday about the photograph, “he just went along for the ride.”
Van Hollen also said that the so-called “margarita-gate” could have been even worse.
“I should also just say, you know I mentioned the fake margarita scandal, they actually wanted to have the meeting by the side of the pool, right? In the hotel,” Van Hollen said. “I mean this is a guy in CECOT, this is a guy who has been detained. They wanted to create this appearance that life was just lovely for Kilmar, which of course is a big, fat lie.”
Abrego Garcia’s experience in CECOT was anything but luxurious: the senator said he’d been kept in a cell with 25 other prisoners.
Abrego Garcia “said he was not afraid of the other prisoners in his immediate cell but he was traumatized by being at CECOT and fearful of many of the prisoners in other cellblocks who called out to him and taunted him in various ways,” Van Hollen explained.
Nine days prior, Abrego Garcia had been moved to another detention facility in Santa Ana, where the conditions were better. But Van Hollen stressed that Abrego Garcia had been given no contact with the outside world, and no opportunity to communicate with a lawyer or his loved ones since he was “abducted.”
“His conversation with me was the first communication he’d had with anybody outside of prison since he was abducted,” Van Hollen said.
The Trump administration continues to flout orders from a federal court, an appeals court, and the Supreme Court ordering it to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia, who was deported due to an “administrative error.”
The post Dem Senator Reveals How Far El Salvador Went to Lie About Meeting appeared first on New Republic.
