Star Metro - US senator meets wrongfully deported Salvadoran migrant

Van Hollen had earlier said he had been denied access to the prison where Washington has paid President Nayib Bukele millions to lock up nearly 300 migrants it says are criminals and gang members -- including 29-year-old Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

"I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance," Van Hollen later posted on X with a photo of him sitting at what appeared to be a restaurant table with Abrego Garcia.

The dour-faced deportee is shown wearing a short-sleeved check shirt and a baseball cap.

Van Hollen added that he would offer "a full update upon my return" to the United States.

Abrego Garcia was detained in Maryland last month and expelled to El Salvador along with 238 Venezuelans and 22 fellow Salvadorans who were deported shortly after President Donald Trump invoked a rarely-used wartime authority.

Trump administration officials have claimed he is an illegal migrant, a gang member and involved in human trafficking, without providing evidence.

Abrego Garcia had enjoyed a protected status in the United States, precluding his deportation to El Salvador for his own safety.

A federal judge has since ordered he be returned, later backed up by the Supreme Court.

But the administration -- despite admitting an "administrative error" in his deportation -- contends he is now solely in Salvadoran custody.

- 'Staying in El Salvador' -

Bukele, who met Trump in Washington on Monday, said he does not have the power to send the man back.

The Salvadoran leader posted to X late Thursday that Abrego Garcia was "sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador."

The deportee in fact appeared to have a cup of coffee and glass of water on the table in front of him.

"Now that he's been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador's custody," Bukele added in another post.

Van Hollen, on the second day of his trip to El Salvador, had earlier tried to make his way to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) outside the capital San Salvador to see Abrego Garcia.

The car he was traveling in was stopped by soldiers, he said, about three kilometers (1.8 miles) from the complex holding thousands of Salvadoran gangsters, and now also hundreds of migrants expelled from the United States.

"We were told by the soldiers that they had been ordered not to allow us to proceed," the senator later told reporters.

- Cots without mattresses -

He said the goal had been to check on the health and well-being of Abrego Garcia, who had been "illegally abducted" and was now the subject of "illegal detention" in the same prison built to hold members of gangs who had previously threatened his family.

On Wednesday, Salvadoran Vice President Felix Ulloa had denied Van Hollen permission to see the prisoner or even talk to him by telephone.

Asked why Abrego Garcia was being held at all, Ulloa told him "that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador, the government of El Salvador, to keep him at CECOT," the senator recounted.

Bukele had built the CECOT to hold gang members rounded up in an iron-fisted anti-crime drive welcomed by most Salvadorans but widely denounced for violating human rights.

CECOT inmates are confined to their cells for all but 30 minutes a day, denied visits, forced to sleep on stainless steel cots without mattresses, and subsist on a diet of mostly beans and pasta.

T. MacDonald--SMC