Cory Booker To Lead El Salvador Trip On Behalf of Deported MS-13 Member

A growing number of congressional Democrats are making plans to visit El Salvador, where they will meet with local officials and check on the status of an individual with confirmed MS-13 affiliations who was deported under the Trump administration. Among those preparing to travel is New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, a potential contender for the 2028 presidential race.

The delegation’s interest has been sparked by concerns surrounding Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national currently jailed in El Salvador. He was previously accused by Trump-era officials of being tied to gang activity—a claim that the Justice Department substantiated in documents released Wednesday.

Booker, who holds the position of the Senate’s No. 4 Democrat, is reportedly leading the coordination of the upcoming trip, according to Politico.

In a separate but related development, Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland journeyed to El Salvador on Wednesday, fulfilling his earlier vow to visit the country should Abrego Garcia continue to be held. Van Hollen had also requested a meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele during the president’s recent U.S. visit.

His trip, however, has drawn sharp criticism from Maryland citizen Patty Morin. Her daughter, Rachel, was brutally assaulted and murdered in August 2023 by an undocumented immigrant, an event that left Morin both grieving and furious.

Speaking at a White House press conference Wednesday as a “special guest” of press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Morin condemned Van Hollen for what she saw as a misplaced sense of priorities.

“I just don’t understand this,” she said, expressing disbelief 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” would “use my tax money to fly to El Salvador to bring back a person … who isn’t even an American citizen.”

She continued, “A lot of you don’t know the whole story about Rachel and about the crime that was committed against her. 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.”

Morin went on to describe the harrowing details she learned during the trial. “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.”

“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.”

“He attacked her. He dragged her 150 feet. Blood gushing from her head, it left a 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,” Morin said, her voice heavy with emotion.

“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.