A Democrat senator flew out to El Salvador on Wednesday to lobby for the release of wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
But Maryland’s Chris Van Hollen infuriated Republicans with the trip, accusing him of violating a 200-year-old law aimed at preventing people from undermining the government.
Garcia, who lives with his wife and children in Van Hollen’s state, was sent to the Central American country by Donald Trump’s administration. The U.S. government has since refused to comply with a federal court order demanding the 29-year-old’s repatriation.
Van Hollen said on Wednesday he had been denied access to Garcia, who is being held in a Salvadoran mega-prison known as CECOT indefinitely despite not having a criminal record.
White House communications director Steven Cheung attacked the senator for his attempted intervention while the president’s border czar Tom Homan called the trip “disgusting” during an interview with Fox News.
The Department of Homeland Security insisted in a statement of its own, without providing evidence, that Garcia is an “MS-13 gang member, human trafficker and illegal alien.”
In advance of the senator’s visit, veteran Republican political adviser Roger Stone declared on X that Van Hollen should face prosecution, an argument enthusiastically taken up by the MAGA movement on social media.
“Pursuing your own individual foreign policy is a violation of the Logan Act,” he wrote. “The FBI should arrest this senator the instant he returns to the country.”
The act invoked by Stone was passed by the Fifth Congress in 1798 and signed into law by President John Adams the following year.
It states: “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
“This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply, himself or his agent, to any foreign government or the agents thereof for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects.”
The act takes its name from Pennsylvania legislator Dr George Logan, who travelled to Paris in 1798 to engage in negotiations there as a private citizen concerning the United States’ debts to France.
It is intended to prevent Americans from undermining the position of their own government by such endeavours, ensuring that the nation speaks with one voice on foreign affairs.
The Logan Act has rarely been enforced over the past two centuries. A 2018 Congressional Research Service report noted that only two individuals have ever been prosecuted under it – a Kentucky farmer in 1803, who called for the Western United States to ally with France and a man in 1853 who wrote a letter to the President of Mexico – and neither case ended with a conviction.
Its enactment has often been called for though, with former president Ronald Reagan suggesting it be used against the Reverend Jesse Jackson for travelling to Cuba and Nicaragua in 1984, to give just one example.
Trump himself has been threatened with it after appearing to encourage Russian spy agencies to hack Hillary Clinton’s email accounts in 2016 and twice last year for hosting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at Mar-a-Lago and claiming to have held regular phone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin while out of office.
He in turn accused Democrats John Kerry and Chris Murphy of Logan Act violations for meeting with Iranian officials in 2019 and 2020 respectively.
But concerns about the Adams-era legislation’s vagueness and potential infringement of First Amendment free speech protections have led some legal scholars to brand it unconstitutional.
Daniel B Rice of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville – School of Law is quoted in the congressional report calling the act a “dead letter,” an “anachronism,” a “curious federalist antique,” “the most moribund of federal statutes,” and an “eighteenth century relic that slumbers in splendid disregard.”
The service’s report concludes on an ambiguous note, saying: “It is impossible to say what a modern court would do if presented with an actual Logan Act indictment.”
While Van Hollen made clear that his actions this week were being carried out in a political capacity and not as a private citizen, it is possible the Trump administration could seek to make a case against him.
But Julian Ku, a law professor at Hofstra University, has been dismissive of the act’s application, telling Axios that it amounted to a “useful way for people to accuse each other of undermining U.S. foreign policy” but is not a “meaningful law” that is “likely to ever be used.”
Elon Musk’s SpaceX frontrunner to build Trump’s Golden Dome missile shield
DOGE puts entire AmeriCorps leadership on leave as future of group in jeopardy
The climate crisis truth that Trump’s re-election helped expose
Credit card late fee cap scrapped as Trump admin sides with Wall Street banks
Trump approval rating knocked by poll showing trust in Republicans dropping: Live
White House says wrongly deported father ‘will never live in the US again’
