Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD)’s recent trip to Central America was hardly the Margaritaville portrayed in photos.
The senator addressed reporters after returning from El Salvador on Friday following his meeting with wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, continuing to call for his return and revealing that the margarita-filled photo op shared by El Salvador president Nayib Bukele was staged.
In a desperate bid to prove naysayers wrong, Bukele posted photos of Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia to his X account on Thursday night, showing the men talking at a table with what looks to be margaritas in front of them.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the “death camps” & “torture”, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!🍹 pic.twitter.com/r6VWc6Fjtn
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) April 18, 2025
Bukele designed the accompanying caption to ridicule critics, making reference to people’s concerns that Abrego Garcia had been killed or tortured while being held in CECOT, the country’s most notorious maximum security prison. Bukele claimed that, far from coming to harm, Abrego Garcia was now in a “tropical paradise” and “sipping margaritas.”
After addressing more pressing concerns like Abrego Garcia’s wellbeing and legal battle, Van Hollen took some time out of his press conference—while flanked on all sides by Abrego Garcia’s loved ones—to address the staged photos, telling reporters how the margarita photo op came to be.
“As we were talking, 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 round the top, but they look like margaritas,” the senator began. “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 can know that.”
He continued, “If you look at the picture I sent out from the beginning of our meeting, you’ll see there are no glasses on the table, so you’ll see in later videos they are on the table. But they made a little mistake: if you sip out of one of those glasses, some of whatever it was, salt or sugar, would disappear—you would see a gap. There’s no gap. Nobody drank any margaritas or sugar water or whatever it is.”
The point of highlighting this, Van Hollen explained, was that it illustrated the lengths Bukele will go to to “deceive people about what’s going on,” as well as just how far President Donald Trump will go, because when asked about the meeting, he just “went along for the ride,” calling Van Hollen a “fool” for “begging for attention from the Fake News Media.”
Van Hollen continued, telling reporters that despite the fact the Trump administration has “been lying about this case from the beginning” and “trying to change the subject,” ultimately this is about “adhering to the Constitution, to the right of due process, and that’s why we say bring Kilmar home so he can be afforded his rights under the Constitution.”
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