DULLES, Va. — Appearing emotional and tired, Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen arrived back in the United States on Friday afternoon, marking his return from a trip to El Salvador where he met with mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Van Hollen told reporters that, despite his ordeal, Abrego Garcia was most concerned about his family. The Democratic senator said he appeared to be in good condition from a “surface-level” examination during their one-hour meeting, which occurred at the hotel where Van Hollen stayed during his trip.

“I told (his wife) what he said to me, which was first and foremost, that he missed her and his family,” Van Hollen said at a news conference surrounded by Abrego Garcia’s wife, brother and Hispanic community leaders.

While Van Hollen did not specify how Salvadoran officials arranged his meeting with Abrego Garcia, he believes President Nayib Bukele was pressured by his presence in the country.

“They were feeling the pressure because while I was in El Salvador, we had two major press conferences that included the local press,” Van Hollen said, claiming Bukele wanted the meeting held at the hotel’s pool to falsely project a sanitized image of the situation.

According to Van Hollen, Abrego Garcia recalled how he was pulled over and taken away by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement while his 5-year-old autistic son was in the car. He was transported from Maryland to a detention center in Texas before being flown to El Salvador, ending up at the notorious CECOT prison, Van Hollen said.

Van Hollen said Abrego Garcia shared a cell with about 25 other prisoners and was taunted by prisoners in different cell blocks. Van Hollen said that, while Abrego Garcia has since been moved to another prison with better conditions, he’s had no access to the outside world for more than a month until Thursday’s meeting.

The senator characterized the trip as a way to uphold constitutional rights in the wake of multiple court decisions against President Donald Trump’s administration, which has refused to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.

“If you deny the constitutional rights of one man, you threaten the constitutional right to due process for everyone else,” Van Hollen said.

The case has further inflamed tensions in America’s immigration debate. Democrats have framed Abrego Garcia’s deportation as a tragic miscarriage of justice without due process, while Trump and Republicans have grown increasingly critical of what they see as selective outrage from opponents who are uninterested in addressing immigration- and crime-related issues.

Van Hollen called out Trump for framing the issue this way, calling it an “outright lie.”

“The Trump administration is saying that those who want to fight for our Constitution don’t want to fight gang violence,” the senator said. “That is an outright lie. That is a big, big lie.”

ICE deported Abrego Garcia, 29, from Maryland last month despite him being granted “withholding of removal” status in 2019 and having legal working papers. In allowing Abrego Garcia to remain in the U.S., the judge’s order at the time said it was “more likely than not that he would be persecuted by gangs” if deported to El Salvador.

“If you want to make claims about Mr. Abrego Garcia and MS-13, you should present them in the court, not over social media,” Van Hollen said, referring to the gang Trump officials have repeatedly accused Abrego Garcia of belonging to — though he has not been convicted of any crimes in the U.S. or El Salvador.

In a social media post Friday, Trump said Van Hollen “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention.” He later told reporters Abrego Garcia was “not a very innocent guy” while reading from a piece of paper with information he said contained information about Abrego Garcia’s past legal troubles, including a 2021 domestic violence complaint in which no charges were filed.

“This is the man that the Democrats are wanting us to fly back from El Salvador to be a happily ensconced member of the USA family,” Trump said.

Trump also said Abrego Garcia was “unbelievably bad” and called him both an “illegal alien” and a “foreign terrorist.”

_____

©2025 Baltimore Sun. Visit baltimoresun.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.