There was the pool furniture in the background. There were the tropical drinks, which looked to be margaritas garnished with cherries. And then there were the deported prisoner and the American senator, sitting and chatting.
That senator, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, accused El Salvador’s government on Friday of aiming to paint the picture of a leisurely respite for the wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia by staging their meeting with drinks appearing to be alcohol, and angling to set the meeting by a hotel pool.
Van Hollen referred to the stagecraft with a term that had ricocheted around social media for much of the day: “Margaritagate.”
“Nobody drank any margaritas or sugar water or whatever it is,” the Democratic senator said, calling the whole situation “a lesson” in “the lengths that President Bukele will do to deceive people about what’s going on.”
A Salvadoran citizen who was living in Maryland, Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation.
U.S. President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said this week that they have no basis to return him to the United States, even as the Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake and the U.S. Supreme Court has called on the administration to facilitate his return.
During a news conference Friday at Dulles International Airport, just after returning from El Salvador, the Maryland Democrat said Bukele is aiming to “deceive” people about what happened during his meeting with Abrego Garcia, in part by posting a photo with drinks appearing to be alcohol.
When he and Abrego Garcia first sat down for a meeting at the hotel where Van Hollen had been staying, the senator said, they “just had glasses of water on the table, maybe some coffee.”
Subsequently, Van Hollen said, “one of the government people” on the sidelines of their half-hour meeting deposited other beverages on the table, with salt or sugar around the top — “but they look like margaritas.”
On X Thursday night, Bukele posted photos of Van Hollen seated with Abrego Garcia, including with the drinks, garnished with maraschino cherries.
“Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” Bukele wrote, adding an emoji of a tropical drink.
Van Hollen also noted that the Bukele government had initially proposed that he and Abrego Garcia conduct their meeting poolside at the hotel, rather than in the restaurant setting where they convened.
“They want to create this appearance that life was just lovely for Kilmar,” Van Hollen said.
In Friday’s news conference, Van Hollen also revealed that Abrego Garcia told him that he was no longer being held at the high-security Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, where he and others were initially taken upon leaving the U.S. Van Hollen said he was initially denied entry to the facility but surmised Friday that had been because Abrego Garcia had already been moved from there to a detention center with better conditions.
“They decided that it was not a good look to continue to detain Abrego Garcia without anybody having access to him,” Van Hollen said. He added that Abrego Garcia told him he had not had contact with anyone outside prison at all since he was removed from the United States.
It was unclear where Abrego Garcia was taken after the meeting with Van Hollen.
Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, wiped away tears as Van Hollen spoke of her husband’s comments about wanting to speak with his wife. She did not speak during the news conference.
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Kinnard can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP