LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen held a face-to-face meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia yesterday.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
He's the Salvadoran citizen who lived in Maryland for about 15 years before the administration illegally deported him last month. Now he's being held in a notorious megaprison in El Salvador, where the administration is sending people deported from the U.S. Now, the White House insists he will not be returning to the U.S., despite a federal judge's order to facilitate his return.
FADEL: Joining us with the latest is NPR's Ryland Barton. Good morning, Ryland.
RYLAND BARTON, BYLINE: Hi, Leila.
FADEL: OK. So Senator Van Hollen says Salvadoran officials initially refused to let him meet with Abrego Garcia, and then we see a meeting happened. What changed?
BARTON: Yeah. So we know very little about how exactly the meeting happened. But in an interview yesterday on All Things Considered, Van Hollen said soldiers had initially prevented him from reaching the prison.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: I was stopped by soldiers about 3 kilometers out who said they'd been ordered not to allow me to go see him. My mission today was simply to see how his health is, what his condition is.
BARTON: So later in the day, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, tweeted that Van Hollen had met with Abrego Garcia and said that since Abrego Garcia had been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador's custody. The senator then tweeted out a picture of the two of them sitting at a table and said he had called Abrego Garcia's wife to pass along a message of love.
In a statement, White House spokesman Kush Desai said the meeting showed Democrats were prioritizing the welfare of what he called an illegal alien MS-13 terrorist. The Trump administration has repeatedly said Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, which is a transnational gang. But Abrego Garcia's lawyers dispute that, pointing to the fact that he doesn't even have a criminal record in the U.S.
FADEL: Now, there was yet another court ruling against the Trump administration's handling of Abrego Garcia yesterday. What did it say?
BARTON: Yeah. So the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals tore into the administration, saying they are, quote, "asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process." Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, who was appointed by President Reagan, headed up that three-judge panel. He noted that the Justice Department had already admitted it deported Abrego Garcia mistakenly and asked, quote, "why then should it not make what was wrong right?"
Earlier this week, a judge had ruled Abrego Garcia's lawyers should be able to question administration officials. But the Department of Justice argues that that was untenable and said the government had no powers to return Abrego Garcia. But with this latest ruling, they have lost that argument. So now officials must explain what they're doing, if anything, to bring him back, or they could appeal again, this time to the Supreme Court.
FADEL: And what did the court say about the administration's refusal to comply with these orders?
BARTON: Yeah. So Judge Wilkinson said this is a slippery slope. In his order, he imagined a future in which there would be no assurances that the executive branch would not deport American citizens or train its powers on political enemies. He said we're in a moment where the executive and judicial branches are close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both. But he also said there is an opportunity here, saying, quote, "we yet cling to the hope that it is not naive to believe our good brethren in the executive branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos." This ruling follows a decision from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg earlier this week, where he said he might hold Trump officials in contempt for disregarding his order to stop sending deportees to that same Salvadoran prison.
FADEL: That's NPR's Ryland Barton. Thank you, Ryland.
BARTON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
