Senator Van Hollen finally got his meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador on Thursday after originally being blocked by the country’s government from doing so. Though the two men were able to sit and speak, Mr. Abrego will not be released from Salvadoran custody. 

Mr. Van Hollen and President Bukele both shared photos of the senator’s meeting with Mr. Abrego late Thursday night. 

“I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance,” Mr. Van Hollen wrote on X, including a photo of the two of them sitting at a table together. “I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.”

The Maryland senator has become a posterboy for Republicans who say the Democrats are now more concerned about one migrant than they are about their own native-born constituents. On Wednesday afternoon, a Maryland woman named Patty Morin — whose daughter Rachel Morin was raped and murdered by an illegal immigrant — took to the White House podium to denounce Mr. Van Hollen for his trip to see Mr. Abrego in El Salvador. 

“To have a senator from Maryland who didn’t even acknowledge — or, barely acknowledged my daughter and the brutal death that she endured, leaving her five children without a mother … so that he can use my taxpayer money to fly to El Salvador to bring back someone that’s not even an American citizen — why does that person have more right[s] than I do, or my daughter, or my grandchildren?” Ms. Morin told members of the White House press corps. “I don’t understand this.”

Mr. Bukele confirmed that Mr. Abrego still will not be allowed to return to the United States. The Trump administration has said they are powerless to get the Salvadoran president to release Mr. Abrego, which the Supreme Court has said is necessary in this case. 

“Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture,’ now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” Mr. Bukele wrote on X, sharing photos of the two men that appear to show them each with tropical drinks on the table in front of them. 

In a follow-up post, Mr. Bukele says Mr. Abrego will have “the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody” now that he has “been confirmed healthy.”

Mr. Abrego was born and raised in El Salvador before fleeing to the United States as a teenager. He left his home country for fear of gang violence 15 years ago, after a local gang threatened his family and demanded payment from them. That same gang threatened to recruit both Mr. Abrego and his brother, and also told the family that they would rape Mr. Abrego’s sisters if they did not pay up. 

After coming into the United States illegally, Mr. Abrego lived for years without paperwork before being arrested while loitering outside of a Maryland Home Depot looking for work. The police took him and three other suspected gang members into custody before turning him over to an immigration court judge. That judge said that while it was likely that Mr. Abrego was a member of the MS-13 gang, it would also not be fair to return him to El Salvador because of the likelihood that he could be killed. 

Mr. Abrego was later accused of beating his wife, who is now begging for his swift return. 

The federal district court judge overseeing Mr. Abrego’s family’s lawsuit to bring him home, Judge Paula Xinis, has given the deportee’s attorneys ten days to conduct depositions of those government officials involved in his deportation and detention at El Salvador’s maximum security prison known as CECOT. 

Just on Thursday, a panel of three judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that they will not overturn Judge Xinis’s order than Mr. Abrego’s return to the United States be “facilitated” by the American government. 

The author of that opinion, Judge Harvie Wilkinson, was appointed to the bench by President Reagan, wrote not only an order declining the government’s motion to block the original ruling, but a jeremiad against the Trump administration’s whole mass deportation scheme. 

“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” Judge Wilkinson writes. “This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”