Democrats request visit to prison holding Abrego Garcia

Reps. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) sent a letter to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) requesting a congressional delegation visit to the maximum security prison holding Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador. 

“A Congressional delegation would allow Committee Members to conduct a welfare check on Mr. Abrego Garcia, as well as others held at CECOT, such as Andry José Hernandez—a 30-year-old LGBTQ makeup artist who passed a ‘credible fear’ interview during his legal asylum process before being deported,” Frost and Garcia wrote in their letter to Comer. 

Hernandez is one of the 238 Venezuelan migrants who were flown to from the U.S. to the Centro de Confinamiento Terrorismo, a notorious maximum security prison known as CECOT, in El Salvador. Abrego Garcia is also being held at the facility. 

Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran national and Maryland resident who Trump administration officials acknowledged in a court filing was mistakenly deported. The administration has since changed its tone on the matter, and the attorney who admitted the administration made an error has been suspended. 

The two Democratic lawmakers went on to argue that congressional oversight is “warranted” after President Trump suggested deporting “homegrown criminals” or U.S. citizens during a meeting with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele at the White House on Monday. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday there was no scenario in which Abrego Garcia would end up living “a peaceful life” back in the U.S. 

“Deporting him back to El Salvador was always going to be the end result. There is never going to be a world in which this is an individual who is going to live a peaceful life in Maryland,” Leavitt told reporters at a briefing.

The White House has insisted that Abrego Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang and represents a danger to the country. He has no criminal record and has been leaving in the United States for more than a decade.

Abrego Garcia’s family says he is not a member of MS-13 and that he fled El Salvador as a teenager to escape gang violence. 

An immigration court in 2019 declined to send him back to El Salvador, and the administration at that time, during Trump’s first term, did not challenge that decision.