Blue state senator flies to El Salvador to visit deported migrant in prison, only to be denied
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., was denied a visit with a Salvadoran migrant and accused MS-13 member who was deported to El Salvador, after flying to the country on Wednesday morning.
Van Hollen intended to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia, 29, who was deported to the El Salvadoran mega prison “Terrorism Confinement Center” (CECOT) for being an alleged MS-13 gang member, though his attorneys maintain he does not have any gang ties.
Van Hollen spoke to reporters from El Salvador on Wednesday afternoon, when he vowed to continue pressing for access to Abrego Garcia.
He met with Vice President Félix Augusto Antonio Ulloa Garay because President Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez was out of the country, though Van Hollen said he was grateful to speak about the case of Abrego Garcia.
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“I asked the vice president if I could meet with Mr. Abrego Garcia, and he said, ‘well, you need to make earlier provisions to go visit CECOT,’” Van Hollen said.
He told Ulloa that he was not interested in taking a tour of CECOT and that he just wanted to meet with Abrego Garcia.
“He said he was not able to make that happen,” Van Hollen said of Ulloa.
When Van Hollen asked if he could come back next week to see Abrego Garcia, Ulloa told him he could not promise that, either. Ulloa also told the U.S. senator that he could not even arrange for him, or Abrego Garcia’s family, to speak with the inmate over the phone.
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The senator said the situation in El Salvador is “unjust,” and he accused the Trump administration of lying about Abrego Garcia.
“I am going to keep pressing,” Van Hollen said. “I will keep pressing in my remaining time here, and I will keep pressing beyond that if necessary.”
The Supreme Court last week upheld a lower court’s decision to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia from CECOT, where federal officials have sent hundreds of suspected criminals and gang members.
The Trump administration agreed to clear any administrative obstacles keeping Abrego Garcia from coming back to the U.S., but Attorney General Pam Bondi has said that returning him is “up to El Salvador. If they want to return him. That’s not up to us.”
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This has caused no small outrage from Democrats, with Van Hollen being the first to announce plans to travel to El Salvador to help secure Abrego Garcia’s release.
“Mr. Abrego Garcia was illegally abducted by the Trump Admin and, by their own admission, wrongly deported to El Salvador,” Van Hollen posted to X on Tuesday.
“He shouldn’t have to spend another second away from his family,” he went on. “I’m flying to El Salvador tomorrow morning to check on his condition and discuss his return.”
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Van Hollen’s visit to El Salvador comes just two days after another illegal immigrant from El Salvador, Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, was found guilty of murdering Bel Air, Maryland, resident Rachel Morin in August 2023.
Morin, a 37-year-old mother of five, was jogging along the Ma & Pa Trail in Bel Air when Martinez-Hernandez ambushed, strangled and beat her to death.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Van Hollen’s visit to El Salvador was “appalling and sad,” saying he and other Democrats plotting trips to the Central American country are “incapable of having any shred of common sense or empathy for their own constituents.”
“Nobody knows this more than the woman standing to my right, Patty Morin, whose beautiful daughter Rachel was brutally maimed and murdered at the hands of an illegal alien in August 2023,” Leavitt said while introducing Rachel Morin’s mother. “Patty no longer has her daughter because of the failed Democrat Party’s open border. And these are policies that President Trump is bringing an end to.”
Patty Morin spoke to reporters about her daughter’s final moments, saying that “she was not planning on dying. She wasn’t planning on walking to her death. She was planning on going to the grocery store with her girls afterwards.”
“Victor Martinez, he waited for her. He waited for her to come closer. He saw her. He saw that there was nobody around. He attacked her,” Patty said.
She continued, describing the gruesome photos presented to her by prosecutors making their case against Martinez-Hernandez.
Some of the photos, she said, showed Rachel’s body against the bloody outline of her body against a wall, where blood ran down as Martinez-Hernandez raped her before strangling her so she could not live to tell the story.
“These are the kind of criminals President Trump wants to remove from our country. These are the kind of criminals that we need removed from our country,” Patty said. “We are American citizens. Why should we allow people like this, violent criminals that have no conscience at all, to murder our mothers, our sisters, our daughters?
“Why are we not protecting our children?” she continued. “And to have a senator from Maryland who didn’t even acknowledge or barely acknowledge my daughter, and the brutal death that she endured, leaving her five children without a mother and now a grand baby without a grandmother, so that he can use my taxpayer money to fly to El Salvador to bring back someone that’s not even an American citizen. Why does that person have more rights than I do for my daughter? For my grandchildren?”
Still, Van Hollen is not the only Democrat discussing visiting Abrego Garcia and other imprisoned migrants. Far left Reps. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., and Robert Garcia, D-Calif., issued a joint letter in which they said they are “prepared to travel as soon as possible.”
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In their letter, which was sent to House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chair James Comer, R-Ky., on Tuesday, Frost and Garcia requested authorization to send a congressional delegation to visit CECOT to “conduct a welfare check” on Abrego Garcia and other deported migrants at the prison.
Fox News Digital’s Peter Pinedo contributed to this report.