By Mary Clare Jalonick
Washington (AP) – Maryland senator, Chris Van Hollen, returned home from Salvador on Friday after meeting Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly expelled by the Trump administration. We do not know what will then happen in the case.
More Democrats said they would fly to El Salvador to put pressure on his release, but partisan pressure has given no results. President Donald Trump and Salvador President Nayib Bukele downed to keep Abrego Garcia outside the United States, even if Trump’s republican administration officials have described his deportation of error and the United States Supreme Court called for the administration to facilitate his return.
Bukele published images of Van Hollen with Abrego Garcia on Thursday and said that the prisoner of the country’s famous confinement center, or Cecot, “obtains the honor of staying in the guard of El Salvador”. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that he “would never live in the United States of America again.”
The fight against Abrego Garcia is the last partisan flash point when the Democrats had trouble unraveling and repelling during the first months of Trump’s second time.
Democrats say that fight is not only a man’s immigration status, but about Trump’s challenge against the courts that have several times weighed on the case. A Federal Court of Appeal said Thursday in a granted arrangement that the statement of the Trump administration that he could do nothing to free Abrego Garcia from Salvador prison and return it to the United States “should be shocking.”
Republicans do not move
But the Republicans seem to have become more determined to keep Abrego Garcia outside the country. They suddenly criticized Van Hollen’s trip and said that Greo Garcia had links with the MS-13 gang. His lawyers say that the government has provided no proof of participation in the gangs and that it has never been accused of crime linked to such an activity.
Democrats “still and still have priority to the policy on the security of the Americans,” Republican senator John Cornyn de Texas said on Friday in a statement. “It is completely divorced from reality.”
Van Hollen, who will speak to journalists after landing in the Washington region later on Friday, said he would keep fighting for the release of Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who lived in Maryland.
“It is a question of bringing back to the house a man they admit should never have been removed,” published Van Hollen on X.
The Democratic senator published a photo of his meeting with Abrego Garcia Thursday evening but did not provide an update on his status. He said he called Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, “transmit a message of love” and would provide a full update on his return.
We do not know how the meeting was organized, where they met or what will happen to Abrego Garcia. Vasquez Sura said in a press release published by a defense group that “we still have so many questions, hopes and fears”.
After having denied that he knew a lot about Abrego Garcia, Trump said on Friday that he knew that Grego Garcia was “incredibly bad” and called him an “illegal foreigner” and a “foreign terrorist”.
The president also responded on Friday with an article on social networks saying that Van Hollen “looked like a fool yesterday in Salvador by asking me the attention”.
Many members of the congress visit the prison or try
Several Republicans of the Chamber visited the notorious gang prison in support of the Trump administration efforts. Representative Riley Moore, a Republican from Virginie-Western, displayed on Tuesday evening that he had visited the prison where Abrego Garcia was detained. “I now go even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Moore wrote on social networks.
US Immigration and Customs Applications recognized in a legal file earlier this month that Abrego Garcia’s expulsion was an “administrative error”. Government recognition sparked an immediate outcry by immigration defenders, but the White House officials have digested the allegation that he is a member of a gang.
The fight also played in the disputed court documents, with repeated refusals of the government to tell a judge what he plans to do, if necessary, to repatriate him. The panel of three judges of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in the United States refused on Thursday to suspend the judge’s decision to order the testimony under oath by the officials of the Trump administration and declared that the judicial power would be injured by the “constant intimate of its illegitimacy” while the executive branch “will lose a lot of the public perception of its denunciation”.
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, wrote that he and his two colleagues “hanging on hope that it is not naive to believe our good brothers in the executive power perceived the rule of law as vital for the American ethos.”
Since March, El Salvador has accepted more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants from the United States – that 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.
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
