Pennsylvania Dems sound alarm over Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s unlawful detention in El Salvador

Pennsylvania’s Congressional Democrats are sounding the alarm over President Donald Trump willfully ignoring a unanimous Supreme Court order to bring home Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal resident who was sent to a foreign prison after being wrongly accused of being a  gang member. 

All of Pennsylvania’s Congressional Democrats have issued statements condemning President Donald Trump’s refusal to follow a unanimous 9 to 0 US Supreme Court ruling to bring a wrongfully deported legal US resident, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, back from an El Salvadoran prison camp. 

US Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) was the first to issue a statement on Monday calling on the Trump administration to facilitate his return. 

“The Supreme Court made a unanimous decision, saying the lower Court’s order ‘properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release,’” Fetterman said in a post on social media. 

Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran immigrant, has lived in the US since he was 16, when he fled gang violence in El Salvador. He’s married to a US citizen and was granted protection from deportation by an immigration judge in 2019 because he was likely to face persecution by gangs if he returned to  his home country. 

Abrego Garcia — who is also the father or step-father of three children, was a gainfully employed union member, and had no criminal record — was detained by the Trump administration in March and deported n to the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT) , an extremely dangerous prison in El Salvador. 

The administration eventually admitted  Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error,” prompting the 

US Supreme Court to issue a unanimous 9 to 0 ruling for the Trump administration to bring Abrego Garcia back to the US. The administration is ignoring that order. Trump, while meeting with El Salvador’s far-right leader, Nayib Bukele, earlier this week, suggested that the administration is instead going to start sending US citizens to the foreign prison for crimes they committed on US soil. 

Congressman Brendan Boyle (D-Philadelphia) warned that the country is heading into a constitutional crisis due to Trump’s refusal to follow the US Supreme Court’s order. 

“Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported even though the courts said he shouldn’t have been. Now Trump is refusing to follow a unanimous Supreme Court order to bring him back,” Boyle said on X. “We are in a constitutional crisis.”

US Rep. Summer Lee (D-Allegheny) called Bukele’s visit to the White House alarming and pushed back against Trump’s statements about sending American citizens to the prison camp. 

“It’s alarming that Donald Trump not only welcomed a dictator like Nayib Bukele to the White House, but is now openly praising the idea of sending Americans to foreign jails — especially after dismissing a Supreme Court order to facilitate Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return,” Lee said in a statement.

“Kilmar should be home with his wife and family in Maryland — not wrongfully locked up in a prison in El Salvador. When presidents choose which court rulings they’ll follow and which human rights they’ll ignore, we can no longer pretend this is just policy. It’s a blatant display of authoritarianism.”