Man deported to El Salvadorian prison is pictured meeting Democrat senator

 A Democratic senator has met a man wrongly deported from the US to El Salvador and called on the Trump administration to speed up his return.

Chris Van Hollen, the senator for Maryland, posted a photograph on X of him meeting Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was removed from the United States in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation.

Mr Van Hollen said also called Mr Abrego Garcia’s wife on Thursday “to pass along his message of love”. 

The lawmaker did not provide an update on the status of Mr Abrego Garcia, whose lawyers are fighting to force the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the US.

The Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake and the US Supreme Court has called on the White House to bring him back.

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.” 

A spokeswoman for El Salvador’s presidency said she had no further information.

The meeting came hours after Mr Van Hollen said he was denied entry into a high-security El Salvador prison on Thursday while he was trying to check on Mr Abrego Garcia’s well-being and 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 3 kilometres (2 miles) from the Terrorism Confinement Centre, or CECOT, even as they let other cars go on.

“They stopped us because they are under orders not to allow us to proceed,” Mr Van Hollen said.

President Trump and Mr Bukele said this week that they have no basis to send Mr Abrego Garcia back.

US government officials have said that Mr Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who was living in Maryland, has ties to the MS-13 gang, but his lawyers say the government has provided no evidence of that and Mr Abrego Garcia has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.

Mr Van Hollen’s trip has become a partisan flashpoint in the US as Democrats have seized on Mr Abrego Garcia’s deportation as what they say is a cruel consequence of Mr Trump’s disregard for the courts. 

Republicans have criticised 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 Wednesday with the mother of a Maryland woman who was killed by a fugitive from El Salvador in 2023.

‘There has been no ability to find out anything about his health and well-being’

The Maryland senator told reporters on Wednesday that he met with Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa, who said his government could not return Mr Abrego Garcia to the United States.

“So today, I tried again to make contact with Mr Abrego Garcia by driving to the CECOT prison,” Mr Van Hollen said Thursday.

Mr Van Hollen said Mr Abrego Garcia has not had any contact with his family or his lawyers. “There has been no ability to find out anything about his health and well-being,” Van Hollen said. He said Abrego Garcia 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,” Mr Van Hollen said. He said there would be “many more” lawmakers coming to El Salvador.

Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, is also considering a trip to El Salvador, as are some House Democrats.

While Mr 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 congressman, posted Tuesday evening that he had visited the prison where Mr Abrego Garcia is being held. He did not mention Mr Abrego Garcia 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,” Mr Moore wrote on social media.

The fight over Mr Abrego Garcia 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 Mr Bukele’s broader effort to crack down on the country’s powerful street gangs, which has put 84,000 people behind bars and made the president extremely popular at home.

Human rights groups have accused Mr Bukele’s government of subjecting those jailed to “systematic use of torture and other mistreatment.”