In the fading dusk of a hotel restaurant in San Salvador, between the clatter of plates and the whispers of a tropical night, Senator Chris Van Hollen met with a man who was no longer supposed to be there: Kilmar Abrego Garcia – a Salvadoran citizen, once living in Maryland, deported through a bureaucratic gesture as cold as it was calculated.
“My goal was to see him,” Van Hollen later wrote, simply. He had called Kilmar’s wife Jennifer to pass along words of love. Words of hope.
But what do you say to someone who was meant to disappear?
Kilmar is not just a person – he was an error in the system. A man an American court had tried to protect, yet whom the Trump administration still put on a plane, to a country that now holds over 200 people, many innocent, from Venezuela in a maximum-security facility that sounds exactly like what it is: the Terrorism Confinement Center.
A country where President Nayib Bukele dismantles the rule of law with the precision of an autocrat – and is applauded for it. “Now that he’s confirmed healthy,” Bukele wrote cynically on X, “he gets to remain in Salvadoran custody.” The emojis: a U.S. flag, a Salvadoran flag, and a handshake in between. Diplomacy as caricature.
Van Hollen had been denied entry to the prison just the day before. A U.S. senator – stopped by soldiers, treated like an intruder. The symbol spoke louder than any statement: the door to the truth remains shut.
And yet – there they were. The senator. The deported. Two men, divided by bureaucracy, united by humanity.
Meanwhile, in Washington, President Trump said he couldn’t comment – the lawyers. The same lawyers who told the courts there was “nothing they could do” to bring Abrego Garcia back. The same administration invoking the Alien Enemies Clause to deport people like trading cards. And the same party defending the act, claiming it was about security – while staying silent on the collapse of due process, on people held without charges, without trial, without rights.
This case has long ceased to be just one man’s fate. It is a mirror.
A mirror showing how far a state is willing to go when it claims control over the law – not in the name of justice, but in the name of the president. “You cannot appease a tyrant,” Robert Reich recently said. And perhaps this meeting was precisely that: a quiet form of resistance. A reminder that even in the coldest places, a person can sit down with another and say: “I haven’t forgotten you.”
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is still imprisoned. But his name has been spoken. By a senator. By his wife. By journalists. By judges who now write that this administration mocks the law. Who say: “This should be shocking.”
And perhaps that is the lesson of that evening between table and window: that hope often begins where the system ends. In a conversation. In a glance. In a simple sentence:
“I came to see you.”
And in that sentence, there was more humanity than in all the decrees, memos, and talking points with which this president governs.
See also: Original ruling in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia
from April 17, 2025:
English 
German 
