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      Kilmar Ábrego García ‘traumatized’ by threats in prison, Maryland senator says

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      Wrongly deported Salvadoran man Kilmar Ábrego García has been held incommunicado and faced threats in prison that left him “traumatized”, a Democratic senator said Friday after returning from meeting him in El Salvador.Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the state Ábrego García had been living in with his US citizen wife and son until he was deported last month in what the Trump administration conceded was an “administrative error”, traveled to the central American country this week to see his constituent. After initially rejecting his request to meet Ábrego García and preventing him from traveling to the prison where he was being held, president Nayib Bukele’s government on Thursday facilitated a meeting at Van Hollen’s hotel.“His conversation with me was the first communication he’d had with anybody outside of prison since he was abducted. He said he felt very sad about being in a prison because he had not committed any crimes,” Van Hollen said at a press conference at Dulles international airport outside Washington DC.He recounted speaking to Ábrego García about his wellbeing, and informing him of the controversy caused by his arrest and Donald Trump’s refusal to let him back into the United States, in spite of a supreme court ruling saying the president should “facilitate” his return.The senator said Ábrego García told him about how he had been arrested by federal agents after a traffic stop while driving with his five-year-old son, who has autism. He was taken to Baltimore, then Texas, where he was shackled and placed with other deportees on an aircraft where they could not see out the windows. The plane flew to El Salvador, where, Ábrego García said, he was taken to the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) and put in a cell with about 25 other people.“He said he was not afraid of the other prisoners in his immediate cell, but that he was traumatized by being at Cecot and fearful of many of the prisoners in other cell blocks who called out to him, and taunted him in various ways,” Van Hollen said, adding that Ábrego García otherwise appeared to be in sound health.Just more than a week ago, Ábrego García was moved to another prison in the city of Santa Ana, where conditions are better, but he still has no contact with the outside world, Van Hollen said. He has also not been told whether he is being charged with a crime, or how long he will be detained.“They haven’t told him anything about why he was sent or how long he would be there,” the senator said.Van Hollen described himself as motivated to make the trip both out of a desire to relay Ábrego García’s condition to his family, and outrage that the Trump administration had deported him despite a judge granting him protection from removal, over a “well-founded fear of future persecution” from gangs in El Salvador, and was now refusing to bring him back.“This case is not only about one man, as important as that is. It is about protecting fundamental freedoms and the fundamental principle in the constitution for due process, that protects everybody who resides in America,” Van Hollen said. “This should not be an issue for Republicans or Democrats. This is an issue for every American who cares about our constitution.”On Thursday, the federal appeals judge James Wilkinson, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan, wrote an opinion blasting the administration’s conduct in the case as litigation over Ábrego García’s deportation continued.“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” he wrote.The Trump administration has countered the criticism by claiming that Ábrego García was a member of the MS-13 criminal gang, with the White House posting on social media that he was “NOT coming back”.Trump administration officials also seized on a claim from Bukele that Van Hollen and Ábrego García drank margaritas during their meeting, which the senator took pains to refute, saying the drinks had been placed on their table by a Salvadoran government employee.“Let me just be very clear: neither of us touched the drinks that were in front of us,” he said, adding that the glass placed in front of Ábrego García contained less liquid, as if trying to create the impression that he had drunk from it.“But this is a lesson into the lengths that president Bukele will do to deceive people about what’s going on. And it also shows the lengths that the Trump administration, or the president, will go to, because when he was asked about a reporter about this, he just went along for the ride.”Van Hollen was joined at the airport by Ábrego García’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who brushed away tears as the senator described meeting her husband. At the White House earlier in the day, Trump had read from a domestic violence protective order Vasquez filed in 2021, which she has said stemmed from a rough patch in their marriage that they later worked through.“When I asked him, what was the one thing he would ask for in addition to his freedom, he said he wanted to talk to his wife,” Van Hollen said of his meeting with Ábrego García. “I told him I would work very hard to make that happen.” More

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      Wife of Kilmar Ábrego García speaks as White House defiant over US return

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      Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man the Trump administration has admitted it mistakenly deported, expressed relief to learn he is alive after a Democratic US senator managed to meet with him in El Salvador – as the White House posted on social media that he is “never coming back” to the US.“It was very overwhelming – the most important thing for me, my children, his mom, brothers was to see him alive, and we saw him alive,” Vasquez Sura told ABC in an interview.Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen revealed on Thursday evening that he had met with Ábrego García at the maximum security prison in El Salvador known as Cecot, where the autocratic regime holds prisoners without due process. Ábrego García was arrested by immigration agents in Maryland, last month, where he was living and working.Despite being undocumented, Ábrego García had been afforded a federal protection order against deportation to his native El Salvador, which the Trump administration ignored last month when it flew him and more than 200 Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador without warning or a court hearing, in a move that has fallen foul of judges in the US right up to the supreme court.In court filings Friday, lawyers for detained Venezuelan nationals said their clients were being loaded onto buses in anticipation of new wave of deportations, for which there had been less than 24 hours’ notice. They asked US district judge James Boasberg for an immediate restraining order requiring 30 days’ notice, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney first reported.Van Hollen posted a picture of himself with Ábrego García in what appeared to be a cafeteria-style setting in the hospital wing of the prison, and the senator said he would provide a full update upon his return to the US. The previous day he has failed to be given access to the prison or his constituent after flying to El Salvador pledging to try to bring him back.Vasquez described her spouse as “a very loving husband, an amazing father” adding they were just parents “trying to live the American dream”.The Trump administration claims Ábrego García is a member of the Salvadorian violent gang network MS-13. But his family and the head of the sheetmetal workers union that represents the trade in which he is an apprentice, have said he is not connected to a gang. He has not been charged with any crimes in the US or El Salvador and the government admitted in a court filing that he had been deported in error, but since has refused to work to secure his return to the US despite court orders to do so.View image in fullscreenFederal judge Paula Xinis has rebuked the Trump administration for resisting the court’s instructions to have the father returned and has said that the government has not submitted any evidence to her court that Ábrego García is a gang member or criminal.The US president posted on social media criticizing the senator and the press in characteristic Trump language, saying Van Hollen “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone”.Hours later in the White House, Trump reeled off unsubstantiated allegations against Ábrego García as “an MS-13 member, an illegal alien and a foreign terrorist, I assume”. He also read from a domestic violence protective order Vasquez filed against him in 2021 over allegations of domestic violence, describing him as violent and hitting and scratching her. Such a record is normally confidential unless the alleged victim chooses to release it, but the US president read excerpts to reporters.Having previously said it was a bad period in their marriage that they worked through, with counseling, and forged a stronger partnership, Vasquez in the ABC interview declined to discuss the protective order further. “I’m happy he’s alive, and that’s all I can say,” she said.Meanwhile, Vasquez said on Friday that Garcia had been picked up by federal agents as he was pulled over while driving in Maryland. “What we thought was a regular traffic stop, turned out not to be a regular traffic stop,” she said, and reiterated denials that Garcia was a member of MS-13 or any other gang.“He’s not,” she added.Hours later on Friday, the White House made a sensational post on X, mocking the New York Times and Van Hollen and saying that Ábrego García is “never coming back”.In scathing court order, a US court of appeals for the fourth circuit on Thursday denied the administration’s effort to appeal an earlier order from a federal judge in Maryland requiring the government to facilitate Ábrego García’s return, and the judge issued a stark warning about US constitutional democracy, as Donald Trump continues to defy courts’ orders on numerous fronts.The court said the administration’s claim that it can’t do anything to free the father from the prison and return him “should be shocking” to the public.The blistering order further ratcheted up the escalating conflict between the US government’s co-equal executive and judicial branches.Judge James Wilkinson said: “The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.”“Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done,” he added.The panel emphasized that Ábrego García is entitled to due process. “If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order,” the panel said.“The judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions,” the judges said.Meanwhile, federal judge Brian Murphy on Friday barred the Trump administration from implementing a new policy allowing it to rapidly deport hundreds if not thousands of migrants to countries other than their own without giving them a chance to show they fear being persecuted, tortured or killed there.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Trump Administration Blames Boasberg for Escalating Tensions Between Courts and White House

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      After attacking judges and repeatedly sidestepping their orders, the Trump administration has accused a federal judge in Washington of escalating tensions between the judicial and executive branches by seeking to hold the White House accountable for its courtroom behavior.The accusation against the judge, James E. Boasberg, came in a court filing early Friday morning by the Justice Department. In it, department lawyers asked the federal appeals court that sits over Judge Boasberg to prevent him from opening an expansive contempt inquiry into whether the White House violated an order he issued in March to stop flights of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador under the authority of a powerful wartime statute.Much of the filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia read like a normal legal brief, laying out the government’s challenge to a judicial order it did not like. But in its opening line, department lawyers made clear that they believed Judge Boasberg’s recent threat to open criminal contempt proceedings in the deportation case represented another salvo in an increasingly bitter battle between the White House and the courts.“‘Occasions for constitutional confrontation between the two branches should be avoided whenever possible,’” the department lawyers wrote, failing to mention their own role in fostering such confrontations. “The district court’s criminal contempt order instead escalates the constitutional stakes by infringing core executive prerogatives.”The Justice Department’s attempt to blame Judge Boasberg for raising the temperature came as another federal judge, in another deportation case, has opened her own high-stakes inquiry into whether the administration has violated court orders.In that case, Judge Paula Xinis announced on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Maryland that the administration in the next two weeks would have to answer questions about why it had so far apparently failed to comply with directions from the Supreme Court to “facilitate” the release of a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from the same Salvadoran prison to which the Venezuelan migrants had been sent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Maryland senator meets Kilmar Ábrego García in El Salvador amid battle over US return

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      The Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen met in El Salvador with Kilmar Ábrego García, a man who was sent there by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation.Van Hollen posted a photo of the meeting on X, saying he also called Ábrego García’s wife “to pass along his message of love”.The lawmaker did not provide an update on the status of Ábrego García, whose attorneys are fighting to force the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the US.It was not clear how the meeting was arranged, where they met or what will happen to Abrego Garcia. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, posted images of the meeting minutes before Van Hollen shared his post, saying: “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”Bukele continued mockingly: “Kilmar Ábrego García, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ and ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” The tweet ended with emojis of the US and El Salvador flags, with a handshake emoji between them.The meeting came in the hours after Van Hollen said he was denied entry into an high-security El Salvador prison while he was trying to check on Ábrego García’s wellbeing and attempting to push for his release.The Democratic senator said at a news conference in San Salvador that his car was stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint about 3km from the Terrorism Confinement Center, or Cecot, even as they let other cars go on.“They stopped us because they are under orders not to allow us to proceed,” Van Hollen said.Donald Trump and Bukele said this week that they have no basis to send Ábrego García back, even as the Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake and the US supreme court has called on the administration to facilitate his return.Trump officials have said that Ábrego García, a Salvadorian citizen who was living in Maryland, has ties to the MS-13 gang, but his attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of that and Ábrego García has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.Van Hollen’s trip has become a partisan flashpoint in the US as Democrats have seized on Ábrego García’s deportation as what they say is a cruel consequence of Trump’s disregard for the courts. Republicans have criticized Democrats for defending him and argued that his deportation is part of a larger effort to reduce crime.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt held a news conference on Wednesday with the mother of a Maryland woman who was killed by a fugitive from El Salvador in 2023.Van Hollen told reporters on Wednesday that he met with Vice-President Félix Ulloa, who said his government could not return Ábrego García to the United States.“So today, I tried again to make contact with Mr Ábrego García by driving to the Cecot prison,” Van Hollen said on Thursday.Van Hollen said Ábrego García has not had any contact with his family or his lawyers. “There has been no ability to find out anything about his health and wellbeing,” Van Hollen said. He said Ábrego García should be able to have contact with his lawyers under international law.“We won’t give up until Kilmar has his due process rights respected,” Van Hollen said. He said there would be “many more” lawmakers coming to El Salvador.New Jersey senator Cory Booker is also considering a trip to El Salvador, as are some House Democrats.While Van Hollen was denied entry, several House Republicans have visited the notorious gang prison in support of the Trump administration’s efforts. Riley Moore, a West Virginia Republican, posted on Tuesday evening that he’d visited the prison where Ábrego García is being held. He did not mention Ábrego García but said the facility “houses the country’s most brutal criminals.”“I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Moore wrote on social media.Missouri Republican Jason Smith, chair of the House ways and means Committee, also visited the prison. He posted on X that “thanks to President Trump” the facility “now includes illegal immigrants who broke into our country and committed violent acts against Americans”.The fight over Ábrego García 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.Since March, El Salvador has accepted from the US 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. That prison is part of Bukele’s broader effort to crack down on the country’s powerful street gangs, which has put 84,000 people behind bars and made Bukele popular at home.Human rights groups have accused Bukele’s government of subjecting those jailed to “systematic use of torture and other mistreatment”. Officials there deny wrongdoing. More

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      Mother of Woman Killed by Immigrant Speaks at White House Briefing

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      Just hours after a federal judge threatened a contempt-of-court investigation over the Trump administration’s deportation flights, the White House sought to freeze the legal debate by reminding Americans of a heartbreaking case of a mother killed by an unauthorized immigrant.White House officials called a special briefing on Wednesday in the press room to bring Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, who was killed while jogging on a trail in Maryland in 2023, to the podium. She recounted in detail how her daughter, a 37-year-old mother of five, was seized, raped and bashed in the head with rocks and ultimately strangled. Members of her family also appeared at the Republican National Convention last July.An immigrant from El Salvador, Victor Martinez-Hernandez, was convicted in the case this week.The story was a tragic one, and it has fueled Mr. Trump’s arguments about dangers posed by migrants and a debate about capital punishment. Nonetheless, the invitation of Ms. Morin seemed a somewhat transparent effort to suspend the arguments about whether the administration could lawfully send migrants to El Salvador with no due process, and whether it can defy the orders of district judges who order the flights halted.Statistics show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes on American soil than American citizens, and Mr. Trump’s claims of a wave of violent crime committed by immigrants have not been supported by police or court data. But it is a popular talking point among Mr. Trump’s base of supporters, and he often brought out family members of victims during his presidential campaign.By conflating different incidents, the Trump administration appeared to be diverting the conversation from whether his administration could defy the courts, or deny due process to those arrested and shipped out of the country to a prison the United States is paying for.Before Ms. Morin spoke, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, criticized Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, for traveling to El Salvador to press for the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was seized and sent to a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador in what the government admitted was an “administrative error.”Ms. Leavitt accused him again of being a member of the MS-13 gang, a terrorist, and, in a new claim, a perpetrator of spousal abuse. She called him a “woman beater” and waved a court filing, one that sought an order of protection against him.After the briefing, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, acknowledged that she had filed the papers. But she said she had not pressed the case.“Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process,” she said. “We were able to work through this situation privately as a family.”Chris Cameron More

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      Senator Chris Van Hollen Heads to El Salvador to Check on Deported Immigrant

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      Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, is on his way to El Salvador on Wednesday to press for the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant and Maryland resident who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration and remains imprisoned in his native country despite a federal court order calling for his return to the United States.Mr. Abrego Garcia was removed from the United States last month in what immigration officials have since acknowledged was an error. Although the Supreme Court has instructed the government to facilitate his return, both U.S. and Salvadoran authorities have so far refused to comply.Mr. Van Hollen said he hoped to visit Mr. Abrego Garcia at the maximum security prison where he is being held, known as CECOT, about an hour outside the country’s capital. The senator also said he hoped to talk to Salvadoran officials about securing Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release.“Following his abduction and unlawful deportation, U.S. federal courts have ordered the safe return of my constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States,” Mr. Van Hollen said in a statement before his departure. “It should be a priority of the U.S. government to secure his safe release.”The trip comes shortly after President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador traveled to Washington, D.C., this week for a meeting with Mr. Trump. Mr. Van Hollen had requested a meeting with Mr. Bukele during the visit, but received no response.Mr. Trump and Mr. Bukele had appeared side-by-side in the Oval Office, with Mr. Bukele saying he had no intention of releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia and Mr. Trump saying he was powerless to seek his return.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democratic senator heads to El Salvador to try to visit Kilmar Ábrego García

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      Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland will travel to El Salvador on Wednesday and attempt to visit Kilmar Ábrego García, a constituent whose deportation and incarceration in the Central American country, he warns, has tipped the United States into a constitutional crisis.In an interview with the Guardian on Tuesday, Van Hollen said he hopes to learn of Ábrego García’s condition and convey it to his family, who also live in the state he represents.The state department has confirmed that Ábrego García is held in El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), and despite the US supreme court last week saying the Trump administration must “facilitate” his return to the United States, the president refuses to do so.“We were in the gray zone before this. But if the Trump administration continues to thumb its nose at the federal courts in this case we’re in, we’re clearly in constitutional crisis territory,” Van Hollen said.In a hearing on Tuesday, federal judge Paula Xinis criticzed justice department officials for not complying with the supreme court’s order, saying “to date, nothing has been done”. She gave the government two weeks to produce details of their efforts to return Ábrego García to US soil.It’s unknown how far Van Hollen, who has represented Maryland since 2017, will get in El Salvador. While its government has welcomed homeland security secretary Kristi Noem to Cecot, Van Hollen said it has not responded to his request to visit the prison, where rights group have warned of abuses and and squalid conditions.“We’ve made those requests of the government of El Salvador, and I hope they will agree to meet to discuss Mr Ábrego García’s situation, and let me see him so I can report back to his family in Maryland on his wellbeing,” the senator said.“This is a Maryland man. His family’s in Maryland, and he’s been caught up in this absolutely outrageous situation where the Trump administration admitted in court that he was erroneously abducted from the United States and placed in this notorious prison in El Salvador in violation of all his due process rights.”Van Hollen this week sent a letter to El Salvador’s ambassador to the United States requesting to meet with Bukele when he was in Washington, but received no response, prompting the senator to plan travel to the country. Last week, Democratic House representative Adriano Espaillat, who chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, also asked Bukele to meet with Ábrego García at Cecot.During his appearance alongside Trump in the Oval Office, Bukele rejected releasing Ábrego García from custody, saying: “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it.”Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers arrested and deported Ábrego García last month, even though an immigration judge had in 2019 granted him “withholding of removal to El Salvador”, a protected status for people who feared for their safety if returned to their home country. The Trump administration has accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang, which Ábrego García’s attorneys have denied, noting that the allegation is based on a single informant who said he belonged to a chapter in New York, despite him never living there.The arrest comes as Trump presses on with plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, which have seen him clash with judges nationwide. The supreme court last week upheld his administration’s use of the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act to deport suspected Venezuelan gang members, but ruled they were also entitled to due process to challenge their removals.Van Hollen said that the case of Ábrego García marks a turning point for the Trump administration because the president is refusing to follow an order from the nation’s highest court – something Democrats have long warned he will do.“What they have not overtly done previously is outright defy a court order,” Van Hollen said. “They’ve slow-walked court orders, they’ve tried to parse their words based on technicalities, they’ve not outright defied a court order. In my view, this now clearly crosses that line.” More

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      The Trump administration trapped a wrongly deported man in a catch-22

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      It is difficult to find a term more fitting for the fate of the Maryland father Kilmar Abrego García than Kafkaesque.Abrego García is one of hundreds of foreign-born men deported under the Trump administration to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador as part of a macabre partnership with the self-declared “world’s coolest dictator”, Nayib Bukele.The US government has admitted it deported Abrego García by mistake. But instead of “facilitating” his return as ordered by the supreme court, the administration has trapped Abrego García in a catch-22 by offshoring his fate to a jurisdiction beyond the reach of legality – or, it would seem, basic logic or common decency.The paradox is this: the Trump administration says it cannot facilitate the return of Abrego García because he is in a prison in El Salvador. El Salvador says it cannot return him because that would be tantamount to “smuggling” him into the US.The absurdity of the position played out on Monday during an Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Bukele where the two men appeared to enjoy mocking the powerlessness of the US courts to intervene in the fate of anyone caught in the maws of the Trump administration’s deportation machine.“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said when asked about whether he would help to return Abrego García.There is no evidence that Abrego García is a terrorist or a member of the gang MS-13 as the Trump administration has claimed. But that is not really important here.“I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” Bukele said during a meeting with the US president on Monday. “They’d love to have a criminal released into our country,” Trump added.Trump’s lieutenants also jumped in on Monday, arguing that they could not intervene in the case because Bukele is a foreign citizen and outside of their control.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He is a citizen of El Salvador,” said Stephen Miller, a top Trump aide who regularly advises the president on immigration issues. “It’s very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens.”A district court injunction to halt the deportation was in effect, he added, an order to “kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here”.Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, repeated one of the Trump administration’s mantras: that US courts cannot determine Trump’s foreign policy. Increasingly, the administration is including questions of immigration in that foreign policy in order to defy the courts.Monday’s presentation was in effect a pantomime. Both sides could quickly intervene if they wanted to. But this was a means to an end. Miller said this case would not end with Abrego García living in the US.More broadly, it indicates the Trump administration’s modus operandi: to move quickly before the courts can react to its transgressions and, when they do, to deflect and defy until the damage done cannot be reversed. More