WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen said on Friday he had met with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the El Salvadoran man mistakenly deported and being held in a prison in El Salvador, at a hotel after initial requests to meet with him were denied.
Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, said Abrego Garcia was brought to his hotel before Van Hollen left the country on Thursday, after the lawmaker had tried to go to the notorious CECOT prison for gang members, where Abrego Garcia had been held.
The senator told a press conference at the Washington area Dulles Airport that he and the lawyer for Abrego Garcia’s family were pulled over by soldiers 3 km (2 miles) outside the prison and told they were not allowed to proceed further.
Later in the afternoon, El Salvadoran officials brought Abrego Garcia, a resident of Maryland, to the hotel where Van Hollen was staying.
The case has pitted a defiant Trump administration against the courts, including the Supreme Court, raising the prospect of a constitutional conflict after the government acknowledged he was deported because of an administrative error.
“He said he was traumatized by being at CECOT,” Van Hollen said he was told by Abrego Garcia, who said he had been put in a cell with 25 other people for weeks and had not spoken to anyone outside of the jail since being detained.
The senator on Thursday posted on X an image of himself in El Salvador with Abrego Garcia, dressed in a collared shirt, jeans and a baseball cap.
Abrego Garcia told the senator that eight days earlier, he had been moved to another detention center in Santa Ana, two hours north of CECOT, where conditions were better, but he still was unable to make contact with the outside world.
Van Hollen said the Trump administration, which has refused to adhere to a Supreme Court order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, and El Salvador’s government need to be held accountable for complicity in illegally holding him.
“This case is not only about one man, as important as that is.
It is about protecting fundamental freedoms and the fundamental principle in the Constitution for due process that protects everybody who resides in America,” he said.
Van Hollen said the Trump administration had offered to pay El Salvador $15 million to hold its migrants in the prison, and had spent $4 million so far.
He said that when he asked El Salvadoran Vice President Felix Ulloa why Abrego Garcia was held at CECOT, he responded it was “because the Trump administration is paying us to keep him here.”
The Maryland lawmaker also told reporters that El Salvadoran officials had planned to hold the meeting by the hotel’s swimming pool to contradict the narrative that Abrego Garcia was being held in harsh conditions.
He also disputed a social media post by President Nayib Bukele showing two glasses with margaritas at the table where Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia sat, which he said the men were “sipping.”
“This is the lengths that President Bukele will go to deceive people about what’s going on,” Van Hollen said.
(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici in Washington and Ismail Shakil in Ottawa; Editing by Chris Reese, Matthew Lewis and William Mallard)
