Washington — Rep. Robert Garcia, who traveled with lawmakers to El Salvador Monday to demand the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, warned the case is “on its way to a major constitutional crisis” as the White House says it doesn’t intend to bring back the mistakenly deported Maryland man.
Garcia, a California Democrat, said on “CBS Mornings Plus” that it’s “really important” that people understand the situation, after the administration admitted in court that Abrego Garcia was mistakenly sent to a prison in El Salvador with a group of more than 230 men accused of being gang members. The Supreme Court ruled that a judge’s decision properly required the government to “facilitate” Abergo Garcia’s return. But the White House, along with El Salvador’s president, has given no indication that they plan to return him.
Garcia said the situation is “incredibly serious,” citing a lack of due process and the denying of a judge’s order.
“The courts have to be a check on the presidency and on the Congress,” Garcia said. “We all know those basic separation of powers.”
Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, came to the U.S. unlawfully in 2011 and was arrested in 2019. When he was released from immigration custody, an immigration judge granted him withholding of removal — a legal status that forbids the government from deporting him back to his home country of El Salvador. Then in March, he was arrested by immigration authorities and sent to El Salvador, sparking a fierce legal battle around the move and efforts to facilitate his return.
Garcia is joined on the trip to El Salvador by Democratic Reps. Maxwell Frost of Florida, Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Maxine Dexter of Oregon. Their trip comes days after Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, visited El Salvador last week, where he met with Abrego Garcia after being denied on multiple occasions.
The members and other Democrats tried to get a delegation for an official visit to El Salvador, but the requests were denied by the Oversight Committee chairman, Reps James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, and Homeland Security chairman Mark Green, a Tennessee Republican, who said “they can use their own personal credit cards — not taxpayers’ money — to virtue-signal to their radical base.”
Speaking from El Salvador, Garcia told “CBS Mornings Plus” that the lawmakers determined after the refusals that they were “going to come anyways.”
“We’re not going to be stopped from doing the right thing in standing up for due process and the Constitution,” he said.
Garcia outlined that the lawmakers were meeting Monday with the U.S. embassy in El Salvador and would receive classified briefings, along with meeting with organizers on the ground. He said the lawmakers would “demand due process” for the hundreds of people who were deported to El Salvador last month, and in particular Abrego Garcia.
“Democrats have to continue to show up and bring attention to this issue, as Sen. Van Hollen has done,” Garcia said.
Van Hollen said Sunday on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that he traveled to El Salvador to make sure that Abrego Garcia “was still alive and check on his health. But he argued that the case is also much bigger than one man.
“This is not a case about just one man whose constitutional rights are being ignored and disrespected, because when you trample on the constitutional rights of one man — as the courts have all said is happening in this case — you threaten the constitutional rights of every American,” Van Hollen said.
