A group of House Democrats were denied a visit Monday with Kilmar Abrego Garcia during their trip to El Salvador to advocate for his release.
The wrongfully deported Maryland father and Salvadoran immigrant remains imprisoned in his home country after he was moved out of the brutal Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, earlier this month.
The trip to El Salvador by four House Democrats — including Yassamin Ansari, Maxine Dexter, Maxwell Frost and Robert Garcia — follows Senator Chris Van Hollen’s trip last week, when he met with Abrego Garcia for roughly one hour at a hotel before returning to the United States.
Van Hollen’s brief meeting followed several unsuccessful attempts to speak with Abrego Garcia last week.
Frost told reporters Monday that the group of Democrats Monday were denied a similar meeting, and have “absolutely zero indication” that Donald Trump’s administration is “going to facilitate or wants to facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release, despite orders from the Supreme Court and federal appellate and district judges to do just that.
“This isn’t just about him,” Frost said. “The Constitution applies to all people in our country. Due process applies to all people in our country.”
Abrego Garcia fled El Salvador as a teenager in 2011 and is now a sheet-metal apprentice in Maryland, where he has been living with his wife and 5-year-old child, both U.S. citizens. The couple is also raising two other children from a previous relationship.
Images and descriptions of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia were the first accounts of his wellbeing since he was removed from the United States on March 15. He has spent more than a month inside El Salvador jails despite a court order from an immigration judge in 2019 that prevents his removal from the country for humanitarian reasons.
Administration officials have sought to justify his detention — following his removal they admitted was due to an “administrative error” — by publicly raising allegations of criminality, including membership in MS-13 and involvement in human trafficking. Critics have argued that the administration should return him to the United States and raise those claims in court to support his removal rather than deny him due process by summarily deporting him.
Frost said Democrats who traveled to El Salvador are receiving “hundreds and hundreds of calls” from their constituents, which include large immigrant communities, to “do something.”
After Van Hollen learned during his visit that Abrego Garcia was moved out of CECOT, the Trump administration wrote in court filings that he is now jailed in Centro Industrial in Santa Ana, where he has “a room of his own with a bed and furniture” and is “not in a cell.”
“We want to know where is he at now, what is his condition now, his family wants to know, the people want to know,” Frost said. “People should know we’re not the first here and we’re not the last members of Congress to be here in El Salvador … We’re going to fight like hell.”
Republican-led House committee chairs denied requests from Democrats to use official committee funds to send a congressional delegation to El Salvador. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer called the request “absurd,” and Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green said it would “waste taxpayer dollars.”
“If you also wish to meet with him, you can spend your own money. But I will not approve a single dime of taxpayer funds for use on the excursion you have requested,” Comer wrote.
Democrats on the trip subsequently paid for travel using their own funds, they said.
Several House Republicans, however, have recently visited El Salvador, including inside CECOT, condemned by human rights groups as a “tropical gulag” and concentration camp.
A statement from Abrego Garcia’s family on Monday said they remain “particularly concerned about Kilmar's health and hope to receive news about that from the visit.”
Their “presence sends a powerful message: the fight to bring Kilmar home isn’t over,” they wrote.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s “release from custody in El Salvador,” noting that officials agreed sending him there was “illegal.”
Last week, a three-judge federal appeals court panel in Washington, D.C., stated that 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.”
“‘Facilitate’ is an active verb,” Ronald Reagan-appointed appellate judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote. “It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear.”
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