A Democratic US senator visiting El Salvador was denied access to the man wrongly deported by the US and then held in a notorious prison.

Maryland’s Senator Chris Van Hollen said on Wednesday that authorities in El Salvador would not let him visit or speak to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who lived in Maryland before his deportation.

Van Hollen added that El Salvador’s Vice President Felix Ulloa told him he could not authorize a visit or a call with Abrego Garcia, and that El Salvador was not releasing him as the US was paying to keep him locked up.

“Why should the government of the United States pay the government of El Salvador to lock up a man who was illegally abducted from the United States and committed no crime?” Van Hollen said.

The 29-year-old Abrego Garcia fled gang-related violence in El-Salvador at age 16 and received in 2019 a protective order to continue living in the US, according to his lawyers. He has never been charged with or convicted of any crime.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Van Hollen was potentially using taxpayer dollars to “demand the release of deported illegal alien MS-13 terrorist.” Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have denied he is a member of the criminal gang.

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While Washington acknowledged the Salvadoran man was deported due to an administrative error, the Trump administration has resisted an order from the US Supreme Court to facilitate his return, arguing he is now solely in Salvadoran custody.

El Salvador, meanwhile, argues it doesn’t have the authority to send him back to the US. In a visit to Trump on Monday, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele ruled out plans to return the wrongfully deported man.

Abrego Garcia is one of some 300 individuals, mostly Venezuelans, whom the US under Trump has deported to El Salvador in the past few months.

Rights groups are concerned El Salvador and its notorious CECOT prison, where Abrego Garcia is being held, are becoming a “black hole” for the US to get rid of expelled migrants with no legal repercussions.

In a report last week, Human Rights Watch said the US and El Salvador have subjected dozens to “enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention.”