By MARY CLARE JALONICK
WASHINGTON (AP) — Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen was flying home from El Salvador on Friday after meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported there by the Trump administration. It’s unclear what will happen next in the case.
More Democrats have said they will fly to El Salvador to push for his release, but the partisan pressure hasn’t yielded any results. President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele have dug in on keeping Abrego Garcia out of the United States, even as officials in Trump’s Republican administration have called his deportation a mistake and the U.S. Supreme Court has called on the administration to facilitate his return.
Bukele posted images of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia on Thursday and said that the prisoner in the country’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, “gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said he will “never live in the United States of America again.”
The fight over Abrego Garcia is the latest partisan flashpoint as Democrats have struggled to break through and push back during the opening few months of Trump’s second time in office.
Democrats say the fight isn’t just about one man’s immigration status but about Trump’s defiance of the courts that have repeatedly weighed in on the case. A federal appeals court said Thursday in a blistering order that the Trump administration’s claim that it can’t do anything to free Abrego Garcia from the prison in El Salvador and return him to the United States “should be shocking.”
Republicans aren’t budging
But Republicans appear to have only become more determined to keep Abrego Garcia out of the country. They have sharply criticized Van Hollen’s trip and claimed that Abrego Garcia has ties to the MS-13 gang. His attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of gang involvement and he has never been…
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