Senator Chris Van Hollen, who travelled to El Salvador last week to meet Kilmar Ábrego García, the man at the center of a wrongful deportation dispute, said on Sunday that his trip was to support Ábrego García’s right to due process because if that was denied then everyone’s constitutional rights were threatened in the US.
The White House has claimed Ábrego García is a member of the MS-13 gang though he has not been charged with any gang-related crimes and the supreme court has ordered his return to the US be facilitated.
But in an interview with ABC’s This Week, Van Hollen, a Maryland senator, stressed that the government had presented no evidence linking Ábrego García to MS-13 in federal court. “Mr President,” the senator said, “take your facts to court, don’t put everything out on social media.”
Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Van Hollen contested Trump’s “argument that you can’t fight gang violence and uphold people’s constitutional rights at the same time. That’s a very dangerous view. If we deny the constitutional rights of this one man, it threatens the constitutional rights of everyone in America.”
Van Hollen, who returned to the US on Friday after meeting with Ábrego García, has accused administration officials of lying about Ábrego García’s case in an attempt to distract from questions about whether his rights were violated when he was deported to El Salvador last month.
“I’m for whatever gives him his due process rights,” Van Hollen told the outlet. “An immigration judge in 2019 said he should not be deported to El Salvador because that would put his life at risk from gang members like MS-13.
“The Trump administration did not appeal that immigration judge’s order to keep him in the United States. He is here legally now, has a work permit, is a sheet metal worker, has a family, and three kids,” he said.
“I am fine with whatever result happens as long as he is given his due process rights under the constitution,” Van Hollen added. The administration has said Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error” and the supreme court has ordered that the government “facilitate” his return, setting up a contentious debate of what that means in practical terms.
As Van Hollen made the rounds of political shows on Sunday, he expanded on the theme of a constitutional crisis. On NBC’s Meet the Press he was asked if the US was in constitutional crisis with the Trump administration.
“Oh, yes, we are. They are very much flouting the courts as we speak. As the courts have said, facilitating his return means something more than doing nothing, and they are doing nothing. Yes, they’re absolutely in violation of the court’s orders as we speak,” he said.
“My whole point here is that if you deprive one man of his constitutional rights, you threaten the constitutional rights of everybody,” Van Hollen said later to the Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream. “I would hope that all of us would understand that principle – you’re a lawyer. I’m not vouching for the individual, I’m vouching for his rights.”
On ABC’s This Week, Van Hollen was asked if he had walked into a trap when García was brought to his hotel for an hour-long meeting and the pair were pictured with margaritas. The senator said the drinks were placed there by a government official for the photos, and not touched, and added that the trip wasn’t a trap because his purpose had been to meet with García so he could “tell his wife and family he was OK”.
“That was my goal. And I achieved that goal,” he said.
But he added that “the Salvadorian authorities tried to deceive people. They tried to make it look like he was in paradise. They actually wanted to have the meeting by the hotel pool originally.”
The senator also accused Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”, of “lying through his teeth” about Ábrego García, and strongly rejected comments by Gavin Newsom, the California governor seen as a potential candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, who said that it was politically dangerous for Democrats to defend the wrongly deported man.
“I think what Americans are tired of, is people who want to put their finger to the wind to see what’s going on,” the senator said. “I would say that anyone that’s not prepared to defend the constitutional rights of one man, when they threaten the constitutional rights of all, doesn’t deserve to lead.”
After the meeting, President Nayib Bukele posted the image on X, writing that García “miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Senator Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!”
Van Hollen said the venue for the meeting and the subsequent picture “just goes to show the lengths that Bukele and Trump will go to try to deceive people about what this case is all about”.
On Friday, the White House mocked Van Hollen by annotating a headline about his Thursday meeting with García. “Fixed it for you, New York Times,” the White House X account shared. “Oh, and by the way, Chris Van Hollen – he’s NOT coming back.”
The annotated headline changes “Senator Meets With Wrongly Deported Maryland Man in El Salvador” included crossing out “Wrongly” in red ink and replacing the words “Maryland Man” with “MS-13 Illegal Alien”. They also added “Who’s Never Coming Back.”
But Ábrego García’s deportation was also facing opposition from Republicans. On Sunday, the Louisiana senator John Kennedy was asked on Meet The Press if Ábrego García should be returned to the US.
Kennedy said that Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador and calls for Ábrego García to be returned to the US were “utterly and gloriously wrong” and said that “most of this gauzy rhetoric is just rage bait. Unless you’re next-level obtuse, you know that Mr García is never coming back to the United States, ever.”
But Kennedy conceded that Ábrego García’s deportation “was a screw-up”, adding that “the administration won’t admit it, but this was a screw-up. Mr García was not supposed to be sent to El Salvador. He was sent to El Salvador.” But he said Democrats’ response was typical.
“The Democrats say, ‘Look, you know, we told you, Trump is a threat to democracy.’ This is going to happen every other Thursday afternoon. I don’t see any pattern here. I mean, you know, some day pigs may fly, but I doubt it,”” he added.
