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
Unprecedented gagging order over Afghan data breach should have been avoided, former secretary says
- Ben Wallace tells MPs that he had ordered time-limited injunction to protect lives of Afghan veterans
- Sensitive details of thousands was leaked via email mistake because ‘someone didn’t do their job’
LONDON: The former UK defense secretary has said he would not have proposed a secret gagging order to conceal the catastrophic data breach that threatened the lives of thousands of Afghans.
Ben Wallace told MPs on Tuesday that he had ordered a time-limited injunction to protect the news of the data leak, The Independent reported.
At the time, in mid-2023, the Ministry of Defence had scrambled the learn the source of the leak, which took place when an official accidentally emailed a sensitive spreadsheet containing Afghans’ contact details outside of the ministry.
It led to the publication of the identities of thousands of Afghans who had served alongside British forces during the war against the Taliban, placing them at risk of reprisal.
They were secretly relocated to the UK, and the leak was only revealed to the British public when a High Court judge lifted a superinjunction last year.
It followed a longtime lobbying effort by The Independent and other news organizations to have the details of the leak released.
Wallace told MPs: “We are not covering up our mistakes. The priority is to protect the people in Afghanistan and then open it up to the public. We need to say a certain amount are out of danger.”
On the indefinite injunction, he added: “I didn’t think it was the right thing to do; I didn’t think it was necessary.
“I said, ‘we’re not doing that.’ The only thing we’re going to do, is we need to basically hold off in public until we get to the bottom of the threat these people are under. I said we won’t cover up our mistakes; we’ll talk about them.”
The rules surrounding a superinjunction forbid even mentioning its existence.
Wallace said: “You can have an injunction, I think, without reporting the contents … a superinjunction; my understanding is you can’t even say there’s an injunction. I think I would never have been in that space. Public bodies are accountable. If necessary you could even ring up the journalist and say ‘please hold off, people are at risk.’ Most journalists don’t want to put people at risk.”
The superinjunction was applied by a judge shortly after Wallace had left government.
It came after the MoD applied to the High Court for a regular injunction.
Grant Shapps, the subsequent defense secretary, then maintained the gagging order until the 2024 general election, when the Labour opposition took government.
Wallace blamed the 2022 breach on negligence, adding: “Someone didn’t do their job.”
The former defense secretary had implemented new checking procedures in the ministry after another Afghan data breach, but that “that clearly didn’t happen on this occasion; someone clearly didn’t do their job,” he told MPs.
Wallace said that military and defense spending is not a priority for voters, “partly because they don’t know” the true nature of the threat facing Britain.
