Abrego Garcia told visiting U.S. senator he was no longer being held at notorious Salvadoran prison

WASHINGTON  — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, wrongly deported from the United States last month, told a visiting U.S. senator that he was moved from a notorious Salvadoran prison to a detention center with better conditions — a statement made during a meeting that the American lawmaker said was staged by the Central American country’s government to make it look like a retreat.

Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Friday that the Salvadoran man, who was living in Maryland, told him as they met Thursday that he had shared a cell with 25 prisoners and was fearful of many inmates at the mega-prison known as CECOT before he was moved to another center in Santa Ana, El Salvador.

The senator held an airport news conference after returning to the Washington area from El Salvador. He stood next to Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer, who wiped away tears as Van Hollen shared some of her husband’s comments about missing his family.

The senator, however, emphasized repeatedly to reporters that the case transcends the question of Abrego Garcia’s immigration status.

“It’s about protecting the constitutional rights of everybody who resides in the United States,” Van Hollen said. “It’s very clear that the president [and] Trump administration are blatantly, flagrantly, disagreeing with, defying the order from the Supreme Court.”

The case has become a focal point in the immigration debate. Democrats accuse President Trump of overstepping his executive authority, and Republicans are criticizing Democrats for defending a man Trump and White House officials claim is an MS-13 gang member, despite the fact he has not been charged with gang-related crimes.

More Democrats have said they will fly to El Salvador to push for Abrego Garcia’s release, but the partisan pressure hasn’t yielded results. Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele have dug in on keeping him out of the United States, even as officials in Trump’s Republican administration have described his deportation as a mistake and the U.S. Supreme Court has called on the administration to facilitate his return.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has said that Abrego Garcia will “never live in the United States of America again.”

Bukele posted images of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia on Thursday and said that the prisoner “gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”

Van Hollen said a Salvadoran government official placed other beverages on the table with salt or sugar on the rim, to make it look like they were drinking margaritas. Van Hollen said neither he nor Abrego Garcia drank from the glasses, which in the photo Bukele posted were garnished with cherries.

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. 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 charged with a crime related to such activity.

Democrats “have time and again prioritized politics over the safety and security of Americans,” Sen. John Cornyn of (R-Texas) said in a statement Friday. “It is utterly divorced from reality.”

The Democratic senator posted a photo of his meeting with Abrego Garcia on Thursday evening but did not say anything else much except that he had called Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, “to pass on a message of love” and would provide a full update upon his return.

After days of denying that he knew much about Abrego Garcia, Trump on Friday said Abrego Garcia’s prison record was “unbelievably bad” and called him an “illegal alien” and a “foreign terrorist.”

The president also responded Friday with a social media post saying Van Hollen “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention.”

Lots of Congress members are visiting the prison, or trying

Several House Republicans have visited the notorious gang prison in support of the Trump administration’s efforts. Rep. Riley Moore, a West Virginia Republican, posted Tuesday evening that he’d visited the prison where Abrego Garcia is being held.

“I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Moore wrote on social media.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials acknowledged in a court filing this month that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error.” The government’s acknowledgment sparked immediate uproar from immigration advocates, but White House officials have dug in on the allegation that he’s a gang member.

The fight has also played out in contentious court filings, with repeated refusals from the government to tell a judge what it plans to do, if anything, to repatriate him. The three-judge panel from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously refused Thursday to suspend the judge’s decision to order sworn testimony by Trump administration officials and said the judiciary will be hurt by the “constant intimations of its illegitimacy” while the executive branch “will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness.”

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, nominated by President Reagan, a Republican, wrote that he and his two colleagues “cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos.”

Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the U.S. more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants — whom Trump administration officials have accused of gang activity and violent crimes — and placed them inside the country’s maximum-security gang prison just outside San Salvador.

Jalonick and Gomez Licon write for the Associated Press. Jalonick reported from Washington.