The News
Four House Democrats traveled to El Salvador on Monday to check on a pair of detainees, including a Maryland man who’d been wrongly deported.
“We’re here to put the pressure on the US government, which has the responsibility, according to the Supreme Court, to release him,” Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., told Semafor, referring to the Maryland man, Kilmar Ábrego García.
Ansari, accompanied by Reps. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., and Maxine Dexter, D-Ore. wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio demanding Ábrego’s return to the US, plus proof-of-life updates from him and from Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay Venezuelan asylum seeker who’d also been deported there from the US and is thought to be imprisoned.
The House Democrats self-funded their El Salvador trips or paid with campaign funds, after Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., became the first to head south last week.
But some Democrats argued against the optics of going. “Many think [it’s] playing into Trump’s hands and they are going for press,” one lawmaker told Semafor.