The Maryland senator put a wedge between Trump and Salvadoran dictator Bukele and showed Democrats how to find their spines.
Senator Van Hollen takes questions at Dulles International Airport upon his return from El Salvador, where he met wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia on April 18.
(Pete Kiehart / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
On Sunday, Senator Chris Van Hollen conquered all five morning talk shows. He was by far the most coveted guest after his return from El Salvador, where he stood down the country’s despot and secured a meeting with the illegally deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Van Hollen delivered love from Abrego Garcia’s family and his growing legion of advocates and proved that the 29-year-old father is alive and safe—at least for now.
Meanwhile, on Monday, congressional Democrats began their “week of action” around the cost of living, which got a mention in the Politico Playbook—and hardly anywhere else.
“This week, we’ll be having a ‘cost of living’ week of action, and we have to continue to talk to the American people about our plans,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries told ABC News. “We recognize that housing costs are too high, grocery costs are too high, utility costs are too high, childcare costs are too high, insurance costs are too high. America is too expensive.”
While Democrats have complained that there is nothing they can do for those deported from US soil to Trump’s gulag, Van Hollen proved them wrong. But don’t expect to see Jeffries doing “the full Ginsburg”—DC-speak for appearing on all five Sunday news programs, named for William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer, the first person to accomplish the feat.
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There you have the Democratic Party in the fascist age of Donald Trump. Van Hollen, Senators Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders, Representatives Jamie Raskin and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, and a handful of others are focused on the constitutional crisis we’re struggling through. Most of the rest of the party’s leaders, if we can call them that, are dithering over the price of eggs.
Will Van Hollen’s courage prove contagious? It already has. As I write, four Democratic representatives—Maxwell Frost, Robert Garcia, Yassamin Ansari, and Maxine Dexter—have followed him to San Salvador. But Van Hollen delivered more than inspiration. Not only did the Maryland senator travel to El Salvador; he defied the country’s leaders, who denied him a meeting with Abrego Garcia, and then tried to travel to the notorious CECOT mega-prison on his own. He was stopped three kilometers away by the military. But later he was told the government would bring the detainee to his hotel.
Here’s where the story gets creepy. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, the self-proclaimed world’s “coolest dictator,” showed off his cartoonish cruelty by dressing Abrego Garcia in the comfy clothing of a tourist, trying to seat the men by the hotel pool (Van Hollen refused), and delivering them fruity cocktails.
“Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” Bukele wrote on X, with a tropical drink emoji.
Van Hollen shot back: “I mean, this is a guy who’s been in CECOT. This guy has been detained. They want to create this appearance that life was just lovely for Kilmar, which, of course, is a big fat lie,” he said on ABC News’s This Week.
In fact, Van Hollen learned that the detainee had been transferred to another, less notorious prison, and that conditions there are somewhat better. “He told me about the trauma he had been experiencing, both in terms of the abduction and the fact that he was originally sent to CECOT,” the senator said. He also revealed that Abrego Garcia hadn’t heard from his family or his lawyers and knew nothing about the growing movement to free him, which heartened him.
After his return from El Salvador, Van Hollen declared flatly that the United States is in a “constitutional crisis.” Other US senators are having a harder time saying those words. Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, who has generally been strong on these issues, insisted we weren’t quite there. “I believe as long as these courts hold, and the constituents hold, and the Congress starts standing up, our democracy will hold,” Klobuchar told CNN’s State of the Union, adding, “but Donald Trump is trying to pull us down into the sewer of a crisis.”
I’m with Van Hollen, but there was a glimmer of hope Friday night as courts wrangled over the deportations. ICE buses of Venezuelan men driving to a flight to El Salvador turned around and went back to Texas’s Bluebonnet prison. Around the same time, after midnight, the Supreme Court ruled that, at least for now, the government cannot use the Alien Enemies Act to send the men it captured out of the country.
“The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court,” the court ruled 7–2. In his dissent, a flustered Samuel Alito insisted, “We had no good reason to think that, under the circumstances, issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate.” I guess Alito didn’t know about the buses of Venezuelans whose deportation orders got reversed.
All of these legal battles were roiling before Van Hollen landed on Friday, but there’s no question that he put his foot down on the side of justice. And maybe he tilted the scales on behalf of those detained without due process. Maybe he stiffened the spines of his colleagues. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who looks to be undergoing an extreme political makeover as he hobnobs with righties like Steve Bannon on his new podcast, called Van Hollen’s visit to Abrego Garcia “the distraction of the day.” Van Hollen had a quick answer: “I don’t think it’s ever wrong to stand up for the Constitution,” he told NBC’s Meet The Press, adding, “I think Americans are tired of elected officials or politicians who are all finger-to-the-wind. Anybody who can’t stand up for the Constitution and the right of due process doesn’t deserve to lead.”
The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows each week.
Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economy and set up yet another constitutional crisis at home. Plainclothes officers continue to abduct university students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown abroad to a mega prison against the orders of the courts. And Signalgate promises to be the first of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence at the core of the American empire.
At a time when elite universities, powerful law firms, and influential media outlets are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation, The Nation is more determined than ever before to hold the powerful to account.
In just the last month, we’ve published reporting on how Trump outsources his mass deportation agenda to other countries, exposed the administration’s appeal to obscure laws to carry out its repressive agenda, and amplified the voices of brave student activists targeted by universities.
We also continue to tell the stories of those who fight back against Trump and Musk, whether on the streets in growing protest movements, in town halls across the country, or in critical state elections—like Wisconsin’s recent state Supreme Court race—that provide a model for resisting Trumpism and prove that Musk can’t buy our democracy.
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The Nation
