El Salvador’s vice president denied U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen a face-to-face visit with a Beltsville man improperly deported last month by the Trump administration’s sweeping deportation efforts, saying he should have given the country more advance notice.

Van Hollen said on Wednesday that he asked Vice President Félix Ulloa if he came back to the country next week, would the government then facilitate a visit with Kilmar Abrego Garcia? Maryland’s senior senator said he was told no.

“We have an unjust situation here,” said Van Hollen, speaking from El Salvador while surrounded by a ring of news outlet microphones.

Van Hollen said he also questioned Ulloa about the legal justification by which El Salvador continues to imprison Abrego Garcia.

“And his answer was that the Trump administration is paying the government of El Salvador to keep him at CECOT,” the acronym for the notorious prison where Abrego Garcia is being held.

Van Hollen said he told Ulloa that neither the Trump administration nor the government of El Salvador has provided evidence Abrego Garcia has committed a crime, and that U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said the U.S. would provide a plane for his return.

“I’m simply asking him to open the door of CECOT and let this innocent man walk out,” he said.

Van Hollen then asked if Ulloa would facilitate a phone call between him and Abrego Garcia or with the man and his wife. Ulloa told Van Hollen to ask the U.S. embassy to make his request. Van Hollen said he would.

In response to Van Hollen’s efforts to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., the White House sent out a list of migrants convicted of crimes in Maryland and criticized the senator for not reaching out to the family of Rachel Morin, a young Maryland mother killed on a Bel Air hiking trail by an undocumented Salvadoran man.

Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, spoke at a White House press briefing Wednesday afternoon, recounting in graphic detail the circumstances of her daughter’s rape and murder. She then claimed Van Hollen “barely acknowledged my daughter and the brutal death that she endured” and blasted the senator for his efforts to secure the return of “someone that’s not even an American citizen.”

“Why does that person have more right than I do, or my daughter or my grandchildren?” Morin asked about Abrego Garcia. “I don’t understand this.”

The administration said Abrego Garcia is “already home — he’s a Salvadoran citizen.“

The Department of Homeland Security also tweeted out Wednesday that “according to court filings, Garcia’s wife sought a domestic violence restraining order against him, claiming he punched, scratched, and ripped off her shirt.”

An online search of Maryland court records show that a temporary restraining order was issued in May 2021. It was dismissed a month a later, records show.

Jennifer Vasquez Sura said in a statement to the Associated Press after the document’s release that the couple had worked things out “privately as a family, including by going to counseling.”

“After surviving domestic violence in a previous relationship, I acted out of caution after a disagreement with Kilmar by seeking a civil protective order in case things escalated,” she stated. “Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process.”

She said the order does not justify his deportation.

“Kilmar has always been a loving partner and father, and I will continue to stand by him and demand justice for him,” she said.

Attorneys representing Abrego Garcia and the family could not immediately be reached for comment about the allegations.

Inside the notorious prison

The small Central American nation where Van Hollen touched down Wednesday morning has changed dramatically in the past decade after sweeping reforms from President Nayib Bukele.

Ten years ago, it was among the countries with the highest murder rates in the world. Today, it’s considered one of the safest. But getting there came at extreme cost, human rights organizations have warned, as Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas political party reshaped the government with moves that included replacing the country’s Supreme Court justices.

The Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, has become a symbol of Bukele’s “state of exception,” which began as a temporary suspension of certain constitutional rights in 2022 to target criminal gangs like MS-13. It began after an extraordinarily deadly three days in March 2022, when 87 people were killed after a reported breakdown in a truce brokered by the Bukele regime. The state of exception has been in place for three years.

“Mass, indiscriminate arrests” during the first year of the state of exception caught up in Bukele’s web hundreds of people with no apparent connections to gangs, according to a Human Rights Watch report. Arrests could stem from questionable evidence like anonymous calls or unsubstantiated social media posts, the report states.

At least 75,000 people had been arrested under the measure as of last June, according to a report from the Seattle International Foundation, an organization promoting human rights and democracy in Central America. There are instances of people being released, but one Salvadoran advocacy organization has claimed that as many as 20,000 judicial letters of release have gone ignored by the administration.

According to human rights reports, inside CECOT, detainees have limited access to toilets and hygiene, the lights are left on 24 hours a day, and its cells are jam-packed. Human rights organization Cristosal said it has documented reports of torture, beatings, and denial of food and health care in other prisons across the country.

At least 385 people have died while in state custody since the beginning of the state of exception, according to Salvadoran human rights group Socorro Jurídico. But Bukele’s crackdown has also allowed many Salvadorans to feel safe walking down the street for the first time in years, and he cruised to a second term with 80% of the vote last year, which also required a new interpretation of the country’s constitution to allow a second term.

Law professor Maureen A. Sweeney, who serves as the faculty director of the Chacón Center for Immigrant Justice at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, said she believed Van Hollen’s attempts are likely futile, but are necessary — not only for Abrego Garcia, but for the sake of American democracy.

“I cannot predict the success of Senator Van Hollen’s trip, but success here could avoid a crisis of law in at least this individual case,” she said. “The refusal to return Mr. Abrego is in flat defiance of the rule of law by the President and his administration.”

The government’s refusal to obey the clear instruction of the Supreme Court to facilitate his return highlights the importance of the issue for American democracy and for the balance of power between the branches of our government, Sweeney said.

“The recognition and enforcement of the immigration court’s order in this case is important for Mr. Abrego Garcia, of course, but also for the recalibrating and functioning of our democracy,” Sweeney added.

Van Hollen launched the trip to El Salvador Wednesday, hoping to check on his constituent and meet with government officials to discuss his release.

The senator had requested a meeting with Bukele while he was in the U.S. earlier this week and also said he planned to travel to El Salvador if Abrego Garcia had not been released by then.

Van Hollen’s actions came after the U.S Supreme Court decided 9-0 that the man had been deported in error and that the U.S. should “facilitate” his return.

President Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One that if the Supreme Court made such a ruling he would comply. But so far, there’s been no evidence the administration has taken those steps, according to a federal judge. And embassy officials told Van Hollen that they have not received direction from the Trump administration to facilitate the man’s release.

“The Trump administration is clearly in violation of American court orders,” Van Hollen said. “That still leaves the question: Why is the government of El Salvador continuing to imprison a man where they have no evidence he’s committed any crime, and they’ve not been provided any evidence from the United States that he’s committed a crime?”

‘Typical story for Salvadorans’

Abrego Garcia is part of a sizable Salvadoran population in Maryland, where immigrants represent 16.7% of the state’s population, according to the Office of the Comptroller inaugural State of the Economy Report released in 2024. Immigrants from El Salvador represented 11.7% of all immigrants in Maryland.

The Salvadoran population experienced significant growth in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., between the 1980s and the year 2000, flocking to the region in large measure after civil strife at home.

Today, many work in the restaurant and hotel industries, as well as the home and commercial construction industry, said Jessy Mejia Terry, a Salvadoran-American who has lived in Prince George’s County since moving to the U.S. at the age of 8.

Her father immigrated to the United States in 1985, worked as a dishwasher and then chef in a Silver Spring hotel, eventually bringing his wife and children permanently to the U.S. Now he’s a business owner.

“This is a very typical story for Salvadorans,” Mejia Terry, 45, said.

In downtown Silver Spring on Wednesday afternoon, protestors chanted and sang songs at an impromptu press conference in support of Van Hollen organized by Maryland’s Latino caucus.

An array of state and local elected officials delivered defiant remarks that were punctuated by choruses of “Bring Him Home” and “Si Se Puede.”

Del. Gabriel Acevero, a Montgomery County Democrat, said the Trump administration’s actions against immigrants such as Abrego Garcia and others “exercising free speech” was “evidence of fascism” in what is “supposed to be the greatest democratic project.”

“We are here today because we understand that if they come for Kilmar in the morning, they will come for us at night,” Acevero said.

That sentiment was echoed by Baltimore Councilwoman Odette Ramos, who said she made the trip to Silver Spring because she wanted to show solidarity with other members of the Latino caucus.

“This was a chance for us together to say, ‘This is important,’” Ramos said. “I also wanted to make it clear that Baltimore wants Kilmar home, and that Kilmar represents the fact that this could happen to any of us.”

Banner reporter Sapna Bansil and the Associated Press contributed to this story.