Salvadoran soldiers stop US senator near prison holding expelled migrant

Salvadoran soldiers on Thursday barred a US senator who is in the country to seek the release of a man wrongfully deported by President Donald Trump's administration from visiting the prison where he is held.

On the second day of his trip to El Salvador, Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen tried to make his way to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) outside the capital San Salvador to see Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

The car he was traveling in was stopped by soldiers, he said, about three kilometers (1.8 miles) from the complex holding thousands of Salvadoran gangsters, and now also nearly 300 migrants expelled from the United States.

ALSO READ: 'We know where this leads': How Trump’s crackdown puts Jewish people in peril

"We were told by the soldiers that they had been ordered not to allow us to proceed," the senator later told reporters.

He said the goal had been to check on the health and well-being of Abrego Garcia, who "has had no communication with anybody on the outside," including his wife and lawyers.

He said the man had been "illegally abducted" and was now the subject of "illegal detention" in the same prison built to hold members of gangs who had previously threatened his family.

Abrego Garcia, 29, was arrested in Maryland last month and expelled to El Salvador along with 238 Venezuelans and 22 fellow Salvadorans who were deported shortly after Trump invoked a rarely-used wartime authority.

Trump administration officials have claimed he is an illegal migrant, a gang member and involved in human trafficking, without providing evidence.

Abrego Garcia had enjoyed a protected status in the United States, precluding his deportation to El Salvador for his own safety.

A federal judge has since ordered he be returned, but the administration -- despite admitting an "administrative error" in his deportation -- contends he is now solely in Salvadoran custody.

El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele, who met Trump in Washington on Monday, said he does not have the power to send the man back.

- Cots without mattresses -

On Wednesday, Van Hollen met Salvadoran Vice President Felix Ulloa, who denied him permission to see the prisoner or even talk to him by telephone.

Asked why Abrego Garcia was being held at all, Ulloa told him "that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador, the government of El Salvador, to keep him at CECOT," the senator recounted.

Bukele had built the CECOT to hold gang members rounded up in an iron-fisted anti-crime drive welcomed by most Salvadorans but widely denounced for violating human rights.

CECOT inmates are confined to their cells for all but 30 minutes a day, denied visits, forced to sleep on stainless steel cots without mattresses, and subside on a diet of mostly beans and pasta.