SAN SALVADOR: A delegation of Democratic lawmakers arrived in El Salvador on Monday in a new push to secure the release of a wrongly deported US resident at the center of a mounting political row.
\nKilmar Abrego Garcia was sent back to his country and remains imprisoned despite the Supreme Court ordering the administration of President Donald Trump to facilitate the man\u2019s return to the United States.
\n\u201cI\u2019m in El Salvador to shine a light on Kilmar\u2019s story and keep the pressure on Donald Trump to secure his safe return home,\u201d congresswoman Yassamin Ansari of Arizona said on social media.
\n\u201cWe want to make sure that Kilmar is still alive. We want to make sure that he has access to counsel,\u201d added Ansari, who was accompanied by fellow US House Democrats Robert Garcia, Maxwell Frost and Maxine Dexter.
\n\u201cTrump is illegally arresting, jailing, and deporting people with no due process,\u201d Frost wrote on X.
\n\u201cWe must hold the Administration accountable for these illegal acts and demand Kilmar\u2019s release. Today it\u2019s him, tomorrow it could be anyone else,\u201d the Florida representative added.
\nThe visit comes days after Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen managed to meet with Abrego Garcia, though only after a considerable effort.
\nVan Hollen, who represents Maryland where Abrego Garcia and his family have lived for years, accused the Central American nation of staging a photo of him supposedly sipping margaritas with Abrego Garcia.
\nTrump\u2019s administration has paid El Salvador President Nayib Bukele millions of dollars to lock up nearly 300 migrants it says are criminals and gang members \u2014 including Abrego Garcia.
\nThe 29-year-old was detained in Maryland last month and expelled to El Salvador along with 238 Venezuelans and 22 fellow Salvadorans who were deported shortly after Trump invoked a rarely used wartime authority.
\nThe Trump administration admitted that Abrego Garcia was deported due to an \u201cadministrative error,\u201d and the Supreme Court ruled that the government must \u201cfacilitate\u201d his return.
\nBut Trump has since doubled down, insisting Abrego Garcia is in fact a gang member.
\nBukele, who was hosted at the White House last week, said he did not have the power to return Abrego Garcia.
\nThe migrant\u2019s supporters note he had protected legal status and no criminal conviction in the United States.
\n\u201cMy parents fled an authoritarian regime in Iran where people were \u2018disappeared\u2019 \u2014 I refuse to sit back and watch it happen here,\u201d Ansari said in a statement.
\n\u201cWhat happened to Kilmar Abrego Garcia is not just one family\u2019s nightmare \u2014 it is a constitutional crisis that should outrage every single one of us,\u201d said Dexter, a congresswoman from Oregon.
\nAbrego Garcia told Van Hollen that he was initially imprisoned at the Terrorism Confinement Center, a mega-prison for gang members, but was later transferred to a jail in the western department of Santa Ana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SAN SALVADOR: A delegation of Democratic lawmakers arrived in El Salvador on Monday in a new push to secure the release of a wrongly deported US resident at the center of a mounting political row. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent back to his country and remains imprisoned despite the Supreme Court ordering the administration of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":79975,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79962"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79981,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79962\/revisions\/79981"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}