Lawmakers, legal experts press administration to return Abrego García from El Salvador

By Jade Tran, Tolu Talabi and Jess Daninhirsch

WASHINGTON – Lawmakers, legal experts and advocates are continuing to push for the return of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego García, who was mistakenly deported to CECOT, El Salvador’s most notorious prison, and who has not been heard from for over a month.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on April 7 that the Trump administration must facilitate the return of Abrego García, a Beltsville resident who was spirited away without trial after Immigration and Customs Enforcement accused him of being a leader of the gang, MS-13. Abrego García, a Salvadoran who was in the U.S. illegally, denies gang involvement.

By Monday, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said he could not and would not return him. In an Oval Office meeting, President Donald Trump agreed that Abrego García would not be brought back to the United States. Trump also said he was powerless to free García, a comment that brought a blistering response from Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-8th).

“The claim that there’s nothing the U.S. government can do is absurd,” Raskin said  during a press call-in with legal experts and immigration advocates Wednesday.

“The reason why Mr. Abrego García is in El Salvador is because of an agreement between the U.S. government and the Salvadoran government whereby we’re paying them $6 million for the purpose of holding people that we deport or render to El Salvador,” he said. “They are very clearly, in a legal sense, our agent in this entire affair.”

The call-in by Abrego García supporters was just one of several developments Wednesday in the fast-moving case of him and other immigrants who were shipped last month to CECOT.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg in Washington, who is overseeing a challenge by 238 Venezuelans who were deported to CECOT along with Abrego García, threatened to open a contempt inquiry into the administration, calling its actions “willful disregard” of his orders in the case.

Boasberg had ordered the government to halt flights of Venezuelans out of the country while their case was being heard, but he said the flights took off several hours after his order was issued. The government then claimed — as it has with Abrego García — that it was powerless to bring the Venezuelans back once they were out of the country, conduct that Boasberg said in a 46-page opinion amounted to the goernment “deliberately and gleefully” disobeying his orders.

Also Wednesday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) traveled to El Salvador where he met with government officials and tried unsuccessfully to meet with Abrego García to check on his well-being.

“I promised them [Abrego García’s family] that I would do everything I could to get him out of CECOT,” Van Hollen said during a news conference in El Salvador. “And I won’t stop trying, and I can assure the[Salvadoran] president, the vice president, that I may be the first United States senator to visit El Salvador on this issue, but there will be more and there will be more members of Congress coming.”

Van Hollen said he asked Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa if the government had any evidence linking Abrego García to MS-13, and was told it does not. Ulloa told Van Hollen he needed more time to arrange a visit with Abrego García, but could not say when that might happen. He also denied a request for a phone or video call to check on Abrego García’s health and connect him with his family, but said that “maybe” something could be arranged through the U.S. embassy.

The White House, meanwhile, lashed out at Van Hollen for the trip. It posted a list of immigrants who had been deported from Maryland after committing crimes in the U.S., and held an emotional briefing with Patricia Morin, whose daughter, Rachel, was raped and murdered by an undocumented Salvadoran immigrant near her Harford County home in August 2023.

Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday was adamant about doing nothing to help Abrego García.

“President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That’s the end of the story,” she told reporters. “If he wanted to send him back, we would give him a plane ride back. There was no situation, ever, where he was going to stay in this country. None.”

During a Fox News appearance on Monday, Bondi said Abrego García was “not a Maryland man,” further denying his status as a legally protected immigrant and echoing the claims of Bukele, calling him a terrorist and an MS-13 gang member.

Supporters of Abrego García said on Wednesday’s call-in that the administration was illegally flouting the courts.

“From the day Donald Trump descended the escalator in Trump Plaza in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president, he has put a target on the backs of immigrants,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration reform organization, during the call-in. “What we saw this week from the White House should shake every American who cares about the rule of law in our democracy.”

“The hypocrisy of now taking the rhetoric that ‘we made a mistake’ to ‘he’s a terrorist’ is nothing more than a bald-faced lie,” said David Leopold, America’s Voice’s legal advisor and the chair of immigration practice at UB Greensfelder, a law firm in Washington.

Leopold said that Abrego García was granted lawful status in 2019 to live and work in the U.S. by the Immigration Court under the Department of Justice when Trump was president.

“They [the immigration court] go through background, they go through criminal history, they go through a whole array of checks to make sure the individual that they are allowing to stay in the United States is acceptable and is not in any way going to be a community threat. And that’s what happened here,” Leopold said.

Raskin said that Abrego García, who has no criminal record, has won his case at every level of the court system, including in the Supreme Court.

“It’s pretty amazing that there’s a nine-zero decision from the Supreme Court, which was very much created in Trump’s own image, telling him that he must comply with the due process imperative of the Constitution,” Raskin said. “He should not be in a position of thumbing his nose at the U.S. Supreme Court, which he had bragged about so many times.”

Raskin suggested history is repeating itself.

“We’re living in a time very much like the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790s,” Raskin said, which were laws aimed at restricting free speech and the rights of immigrants. “There are principles very much at the heart of this struggle right now, and that’s the essential message that we need to get through to the country.”

– Capital News Service is a student-staffed reporting service operated by the University of Maryland’s Phillip Merrill College of Journalism. Stories are available at the CNS site and may be reprinted as long as credit is given to Capital News Service and, most importantly, to the students who produced the work.