WASHINGTON — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, wrongly deported from the United States last month, told a visiting U.S. senator that he was moved from a notorious Salvadoran prison to a detention center with better conditions — a statement made during a meeting that the American lawmaker said was staged by the Central American country’s government to make it look like a retreat.

Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Friday that the Salvadoran man, who was living in Maryland, told him as they met Thursday that he had shared a cell with 25 prisoners and was fearful of many inmates at the mega-prison known as CECOT before he was moved to another center in Santa Ana, El Salvador.

The senator held an airport news conference after returning to the Washington area from El Salvador. He stood next to Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer, who wiped away tears as Van Hollen shared some of her husband’s comments about missing his family.

The senator, however, emphasized repeatedly to reporters that the case transcends the question of Abrego Garcia’s immigration status.

“It’s about protecting the constitutional rights of everybody who resides in the United States,” Van Hollen said. “It’s very clear that the president, Trump administration are blatantly, flagrantly, disagreeing with, defying the order from the Supreme Court.”

The case has become a focal point in the immigration debate. Democrats accuse President Donald Trump of overstepping his executive authority and Republicans are criticizing Democrats for defending a man Trump and White House officials claim is an MS-13 gang member, despite the fact he has not been charged with any gang-related crimes.

More Democrats have said they will fly to El Salvador to push for Abrego Garcia’s release, but the partisan pressure hasn’t yielded any results. President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele have dug in on keeping him out of the United States, even as officials in Trump’s Republican administration have described his deportation as a mistake and the U.S. Supreme Court has called on the administration to facilitate his return.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said that Abrego Garcia will “never live in the United States of America again.”

Bukele posted images of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia on Thursday and said that the prisoner “gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” Van Hollen said a Salvadoran government official placed other beverages on the table with salt or sugar on the rim, to make it look like they were drinking margaritas. Van Hollen said neither he nor Abrego Garcia drank from the glasses, which in the photo Bukele posted were garnished with cherries.

The fight over Abrego Garcia is the latest partisan flashpoint as Democrats have struggled to break through and push back during the opening few months of Trump’s second time in office. A federal appeals court said Thursday in a blistering order that the Trump administration’s claim that it can’t do anything to free Abrego Garcia from the prison in El Salvador and return him to the United States “should be shocking.”

But Republicans appear to have only become more determined to keep Abrego Garcia out of the country. They have sharply criticized Van Hollen’s trip and claimed that Abrego Garcia has ties to the MS-13 gang. His attorneys say the government has provided no evidence of gang involvement and he has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.

Democrats “have time and again prioritized politics over the safety and security of Americans,” Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said in a statement Friday. “It is utterly divorced from reality.”

The Democratic senator posted a photo of his meeting with Abrego Garcia on Thursday evening but did not say anything else much except that he had called Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, “to pass on a message of love” and would provide a full update upon his return.

After days of denying that he knew much about Abrego Garcia, Trump on Friday said he knew Abrego Garcia’s prison record was “unbelievably bad” and called him an “illegal alien.”