More congressional Democrats are preparing to travel to El Salvador to meet with government officials and visit an established MS-13 gang member deported there by the Trump administration, including potential 2028 presidential contender Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.
The planned visits come amid growing concern over the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national now imprisoned in his home country after Trump officials accused him of gang ties, which the Justice Department verified with released documents late Wednesday.
Booker, the chamber’s No. 4 Democrat, is organizing the trip, Politico reported.
Separately, Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador on Wednesday, following through on his pledge to visit the country if Abrego Garcia remained in custody. He had also sought a meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele during Bukele’s visit to the United States.
Van Holland’s visit was soundly criticized by Maryland resident Patty Morin, whose daughter Rachel was brutally maimed and murdered at the hands of an illegal alien in August of 2023.
Morin spoke at the White House during a press conference Wednesday as a “special guest” of press secretary Karoline Leavitt, during which she criticized him for going while providing shocking details of how Rachel was murdered.
“I just don’t understand this,” adding she was outraged that “a senator from Maryland who didn’t even acknowledge — or barely acknowledged — my daughter and the brutal death that she endured, leaving her five children without a mother” chose to “use my tax money to fly to El Salvador to bring back a person … who isn’t even an American citizen.”
“A lot of you don’t know the whole story about Rachel and about the crime that was committed against her,” she continued. “They kept most of it close to their chest, the detectives, because they didn’t want to do anything to hurt the case. They wanted to keep the integrity of the case, so they kept everything close. I sat for the last two weeks in her trial and we saw layer upon layer upon layer of evidence against the accused, an Illegal immigrant from El Salvador.
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“And the things that we thought, well, maybe this might have happened, we didn’t know, but we were at the trial, we got all the puzzle pieces. And I want to share some of those things with you. You know that Rachel’s a 37-year-old mother. She has five children. We walked the trail for the last 25 years that we’ve lived in Maryland,” she continued.
“When she went on that trail that day, she was not planning on dying. She wasn’t planning on walking to her death. She was planning on going to the grocery store with her girls afterwards. Victor Martinez, he waited for her. He waited for her to come closer. He saw her. He saw that there was nobody around,” Patty Morin added.
“He attacked her. He dragged her 150 feet. Blood gushing from her head, it left 150-foot trail of her blood to the culverts, where he took, he picked her up, he threw her against the wall of the tunnel, and he raped her,” she said.
“But before he did that, he stopped on that trail, and rocks, still stained with her blood, he used them to hammer her head against those rocks. They say 20, at least 20 times, they could count the cuts in her head. They said that when they did the autopsy, and I’ve seen the pictures, there’s a six-inch square in the back of her head where the skull is shattered the way that you would crush an eggshell in pieces. Three-fourths of her brain hemorrhaged,” she said.