SAN SALVADOR: Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen says he was denied entry into an El Savador prison on Thursday while he was trying to check on the well-being of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man who was sent there by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation.
Van Hollen is in El Salvador to push for Abrego Garcia’s release. The Democratic senator at a news conference in San Salvador that his car was stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint about 3 kilometers from the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, even as they let other cars go on.
“They stopped us because they are under orders not to allow us to proceed,” Van Hollen said.
US President Donald Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said this week that they have no basis to send him back, even as the Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake and the US Supreme Court has called on the administration to facilitate his return. Trump officials have said that Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who was living in Maryland, has ties to the MS-13 gang, but his attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of that and Abrego Garcia has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.
Van Hollen’s trip has become a partisan flashpoint in the US as Democrats have siezed on Abrego Garcia’s deportation as a cruel consequence of Trump’s disregard for the courts. Republicans have criticized 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 on Wednesday with the mother of a Maryland woman who was killed by a fugitive from El Salvador in 2023.
The Maryland senator told reporters Wednesday that he met with Salvadoran Vice President Felix Ulloa who said his government could not return Abrego Garcia to the United States.
“So today, I tried again to make contact with Mr. Abrego Garcia by driving to the CECOT prison,” Van Hollen said, and was stopped.
Van Hollen said 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,” Van Hollen said. He said there would be “many more” lawmakers coming to El Salvador.
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., is also considering a trip to El Salvador, as are some House Democrats.
While Van Hollen was denied entry, several House Republicans have visited the notorious gang prison in support of the Trump administration’s efforts. Rep. Riley Moore, a West Virginia Republican, posted Tuesday evening that he’d visited the prison where Abrego Garcia is being held. He did not mention 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,” Moore wrote on social media.
Missouri Republican Rep. Jason Smith, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, also visited the prison. He posted on X that “thanks to President Trump” the facility “now includes illegal immigrants who broke into our country and committed violent acts against Americans.”
The fight over 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 of San Salvador. That prison is part of Bukele’s broader effort to crack down on the country’s powerful street gangs, which has put 84,000 people behind bars and made Bukele extremely popular at home.
Human rights groups have previously accused Bukele’s government of subjecting those jailed to “systematic use of torture and other mistreatment.” Officials there deny wrongdoing.
Maryland Sen. Van Hollen denied entry to El Salvador prison holding Abrego Garcia
https://arab.news/rsfaa
Maryland Sen. Van Hollen denied entry to El Salvador prison holding Abrego Garcia
- Van Hollen’s trip has become a partisan flashpoint in the US as Democrats have siezed on Abrego Garcia’s deportation as a cruel consequence of Trump’s disregard for the courts
- While Van Hollen was denied entry, several House Republicans have visited the notorious gang prison in support of the Trump administration’s efforts
Hong Kong begins national security trial of Tiananmen vigil group
- Three government-vetted judges will preside over the trial, which is expected to last 75 days
HONG KONG: Hong Kong’s High Court began hearing on Thursday a landmark national security trial of the three former leaders of a now disbanded group that organized annual vigils marking Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.
Once legal in China-ruled Hong Kong, such public commemorations were hailed as a symbol of the Asian financial hub’s relative freedom, compared to mainland China.
“Justice resides in the hearts of the people, and history will bear witness,” said Tang Ngok-kwan, a former senior member of the disbanded group, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China.
He was among dozens who braved cold weather to queue outside the court building, which was tightly guarded by scores of police officers and vehicles.
The events on June 4, 1989, when Chinese troops opened fire to end student-led protests, are not publicly discussed in China, which treats the date as taboo and allows no public remembrance.
Blocked in 2020 over COVID-19 curbs, the Hong Kong memorials have never resumed since China imposed a tough national security law that year. Several June 4 monuments, such as the “pillar of shame,” have also been removed from the city’s universities.
Under that law, Lee Cheuk-yan, 68, Albert Ho, 74, and Chow Hang-tung, 40, three former leaders of the group, now face charges of “inciting subversion of state power” that carry punishments of up to 10 years in jail.
Chow and Lee, one of the city’s veteran democratic leaders, pleaded not guilty, while Ho, also a former chairman of the city’s largest opposition Democratic Party, pleaded guilty.
The trial is among the last of several such major cases, with Chow, the former vice chair of the group, held on remand for more than 1,500 days after being denied bail.
Subverting state power a key question in trial
In an opening statement, prosecutors said the case centered on whether the Alliance’s publicly stated goal of “ending one-party rule” constituted illegally inciting others to carry out acts aimed at subverting state power.
The other key focus of the case was whether such acts amounted to “overthrowing or undermining” China’s system of government, they added.
In the past, the Alliance has said it hoped to see a democratic China and was not aiming to destroy the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but to see it contest free elections.
Rights groups and some foreign governments have criticized such national security cases against prominent democrats as a weaponization of the rule of law to silence dissent.
“This case is not about national security – it is about rewriting history and punishing those who refuse to forget the victims of the Tiananmen crackdown,” said Sarah Brooks, the Asia deputy director of rights group Amnesty International.
Beijing says Hong Kong’s national security law was necessary to restore order after sometimes violent protests rocked the former British colony for months in 2019.
Detained since September 2021, Chow, a Cambridge-educated barrister, is one of the few democratic campaigners still speaking out against the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown.
She has represented herself in court and challenged prison rules.
“The state can lock up people but not their thinking, just as it can lock up facts but not alter truth,” she told Reuters in an interview.
Last November, the High Court rejected Chow’s bid to terminate the trial.
On Wednesday, the judges said the court would rely on evidence and legal principles, adding that it “will not allow trials to become a tool for political repression ... or an abuse of judicial procedures,” as Chow claimed.
