While Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele met President Donald Trump on Monday, U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen said he plans to travel to El Salvador this week if a Maryland father improperly deported by the Trump administration is not returned immediately.

The senator’s declaration came as Bukele said he had no way to move the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, out of a prison in El Salvador and back to the U.S. as a federal judge has instructed. Trump officials have previously said that Abrego Garcia is under the authority of the Salvadoran government.

That scenario is simply unacceptable to Van Hollen.

“Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia never should have been abducted and illegally deported, and the courts have made clear: the Administration must bring him home, now. However, since the Trump Administration appears to be ignoring these court mandates, we need to take additional action,” Van Hollen said in a release this morning.

“That’s why I’ve requested to meet with President Bukele during his trip to the United States, and — if Kilmar is not home by midweek — I plan to travel to El Salvador this week to check on his condition and discuss his release.” Van Hollen said he also wrote “urgently” to Salvadoran Ambassador Milena Mayorga making the request for a meeting.

Today, Trump officials reiterated their belief that Abrego Garcia has a gang affiliation that warranted his removal. But Attorney General Pam Bondi also said Monday that the U.S. government would provide a plane if El Salvador returned him.

“That’s up to El Salvador to return him,” she said. “If they wanted to return him, we would facilitate it.”

Bukele responded he had no intention of releasing Abrego Garcia.

“The question is preposterous,” Bukele said from the Oval Office. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”

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 notorious maximum-security gang prison just outside the capital, San Salvador. It is also holding Abrego Garcia, who has not been returned to the U.S., despite court orders to do so.

That has made Bukele, who remains extremely popular in El Salvador due in part to a crackdown on the country’s powerful street gangs, a vital ally for the Trump administration, which has offered little evidence for its claims that the Venezuelan immigrants were in fact gang members, nor has it released names of those deported.

Asked whether he has any concerns about the prison there where deportees are being held, Trump told reporters early Sunday that Bukele was doing a “fantastic job.”

Abrego Garcia, 29, was detained by immigration agents and deported last month.

The Beltsville man had a permit from the Homeland Security Department to legally work in the U.S. and was a sheet metal apprentice pursuing a journeyman license, his attorney said. His wife is a U.S. citizen.

In 2019, an immigration judge barred the U.S. from deporting Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, finding that he faced likely persecution by local gangs. The government has argued that his grant of “withholding of removal” was no longer valid because MS-13 had been designated a terrorist organization.

The Trump administration has relied on a 2019 bond hearing in which an immigration judge accepted ICE’s use of a confidential informant to claim Abrego Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang, though he has never been charged with or convicted of a crime. His attorneys said there is no evidence he was in MS-13.

The administration has conceded that it made a mistake in sending him to El Salvador but argued that it no longer could do anything about it.

Late Monday afternoon, a protest in support of Abrego Garcia drew a crowd of around 75 people to Hopkins Plaza, just outside ICE’s Baltimore field office.

Attendees took turns leading chants from a microphone as a man banged a drum. Some protesters held cardboard signs that read “Bring Kilmar Home Now” and “Hands Off Our Neighbors.”

While speakers criticized what they saw as Democrats’ timid responses to the Trump administration, Van Hollen appeared to be an exception. An organizer announced the Maryland senator’s plans to visit El Salvador, prompting the crowd to erupt in cheers.

“That is real leadership,” a woman shouted.

Baltimore Banner reporters Daniel Zawodny and Sapna Bansil and The Associated Press contributed to this report.