Maryland lawmakers, legal experts press Trump to return Abrego García from El Salvador

WASHINGTON – Lawmakers, legal experts and advocates are continuing the fight to push for the return of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego García, who was mistakenly deported to CECOT, El Salvador’s most notorious prison, and has not been heard from for over a month.

Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, traveled to El Salvador Wednesday, where he attempted to visit Abrego García and hold talks with government officials to push for his release and check on his well-being, a promise he made to the man’s family during a press conference in Washington last week.

“I promised them that I would do everything I could to get him out of CECOT,” Van Hollen said during a press conference in El Salvador. “And I won’t stop trying, and I can assure the president, the vice president, that I may be the first United States senator to visit El Salvador on this issue, but there will be more and there will be more members of Congress coming.”

Van Hollen said he asked the country’s vice president whether any government had any evidence linking Abrego García to MS-13.

 “They do not,” Van Hollen said, questioning why García is still being held at CECOT. 

El Salvador Vice President Félix Ulloa told the senator he could not visit Abrego García and that he needed more time. When Van Hollen asked if a visit could happen next week, Félix Ulloa said he couldn’t promise that either. 

A phone or video call requested to check on Abrego García’s health and connect him with his family, so they could hear his voice, was also denied. The only possibility granted, Van Hollen said, was that “maybe” something could be arranged through the U.S. embassy.

A couple of hours earlier, Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin blistered the Trump administration for rebuffing appeals to get Abrego García returned. 

“The claim that there’s nothing the U.S. government can do is absurd,” Raskin said during a press call-in with legal experts and immigration advocates. “The reason why Mr. Abrego García is in El Salvador is because of an agreement between the U.S. government and the Salvadoran government whereby we’re paying them $6 million for the purpose of holding people that we deport or render to El Salvador. They are very clearly, in a legal sense, our agent in this entire affair.” 

The Supreme Court ruled on April 7 that the Trump Administration must facilitate Abrego García’s return, but by Monday, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele said he could not and would not return him. In a Monday Oval Office meeting, President Donald Trump and Bukele shared the same stance, both stating they would not bring Abrego García back to the United States. Trump also said he was powerless to free García.

“From the day Donald Trump descended the escalator in Trump Plaza in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president, he has put a target on the backs of immigrants,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration reform organization, during the call-in. “What we saw this week from the White House should shake every American who cares about the rule of law in our democracy.”

Also on Wednesday, District Judge James E. Boasberg in Washington threatened to open a contempt inquiry into the administration, calling its actions ‘willful disregard’ in the context of temporarily halting deportations. Boasberg said he found probable cause to hold the administration in contempt over broader issues with deportation flights. 

Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday was adamant about doing nothing to help Abrego Garcia.

“President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That’s the end of the story,” she told reporters. “If he wanted to send him back, we would give him a plane ride back. There was no situation, ever, where he was going to stay in this country. None.”

During a Fox News appearance on Monday, Bondi said Abrego García was “not a Maryland man,” further denying his status as a legally protected immigrant and echoing the claims of Bukele, calling him a terrorist and an MS-13 gang member.

“The hypocrisy of now taking the rhetoric that ‘we made a mistake’ to ‘he’s a terrorist’ is nothing more than a bald-faced lie,” David Leopold, America’s Voice’s legal advisor and the chair of immigration practice at UB Greensfelder, a law firm in Washington, said in the call-in.

Leopold said that Abrego García was granted lawful status in 2019 to live and work in the United States by the Immigration Court under the Department of Justice when Trump was president.

“They (the immigration court) go through background, they go through criminal history, they go through a whole array of checks to make sure the individual that they are allowing to stay in the United States is acceptable and is not in any way going to be a community threat. And that’s what happened here,” Leopold said.

Raskin said that Abrego García, who has no criminal record, has won his case at every level of the court system, including in the Supreme Court. 

“It’s pretty amazing that there’s a nine-zero decision from the Supreme Court, which was very much created in Trump’s own image, telling him that he must comply with the due process imperative of the Constitution,” Raskin said. “He should not be in a position of thumbing his nose at the U.S. Supreme Court, which he had bragged about so many times.”

Raskin suggested history is repeating itself. 

“We’re living in a time very much like the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790s,” Raskin said, which were laws aimed at restricting free speech and the rights of immigrants. “There are principles very much at the heart of this struggle right now, and that’s the essential message that we need to get through to the country.”