Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man wrongfully deported by the Trump administration to a notorious El Salvador prison, remains there. The government has admitted its mistake in court filings, but members of the administration, from Vice-President J.D. Vance to press secretary Karoline Leavitt, continue to falsely accuse him of being a member of the MS-133a gang, going so far as to label him a “terrorist.” They have spun a Supreme Court ruling directing them to take steps for arranging his return as a victory that lets them off the hook for doing so, and have said flatly that Abrego Garcia isn’t coming back to the U.S., and that if he does, he will be deported again. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, also said that he would not “smuggle” Abrego Garcia back into the U.S. during an Oval Office appearance this week.
Amid this worsening judicial and moral crisis, Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland has been among the loudest voices decrying Abrego Garcia’s detention. On Tuesday evening, he said that he would travel to El Salvador on Wednesday in an attempt to see Abrego Garcia, who has not been heard from since his arrest in March. I spoke with Van Hollen just after he announced the trip.
What do you hope to accomplish in El Salvador?
The purpose of the trip is really twofold. One is to try to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia to check on his condition so I can report back to his family on his well-being. And also to talk to senior government officials in El Salvador about bringing him home and the best path to doing that.
Have you had contact with either the president of El Salvador or senior officials? Have they been receptive to your entreaties to meet with them?
The president of El Salvador was here in Washington, and I asked to meet him. I was here. I did not meet with him. They did not reach back out, but I am working with our embassy to try to secure meetings while I’m in El Salvador. Hopefully, I’ll have more to report later.
What did you make of the court hearing on Tuesday, where federal judge Paula Xinis chided the government for stonewalling her and ordered that it turn over information about his whereabouts and about its efforts to bring Abrego Garcia back?
I just got out of a town-hall meeting and heard about her comments and decision, so I haven’t had a chance to fully digest it, but my understanding is that she is working to hold the government’s feet to the fire, to determine whether it is making any effort at all to comply with the Supreme Court order that the Trump administration facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. If you looked at that spectacle in the White House on Monday, it seemed pretty clear that the president of the United States was doing nothing to meet the requirements of the court order. But I think the judge is building her case carefully, in a way where, I hope, she will have backup from the Supreme Court.
Can you talk a little about what is at stake here, in your view? Obviously, not just about this individual case, but the implications — the fact that the Trump administration is not really following a court order and being pretty open in its defiance of it. You hear the words constitutional crisis a lot, and whether we’re there or not there.
I think we are in a constitutional crisis. I think we’ve been in a gray area for some time, but I think this outright defiance of a court order, including a 9–0 decision by the Supreme Court, takes us into uncharted territory. Because prior to this, the administration was slow-walking some court orders. They were trying to revisit court orders. But in this case, I know they claim they’re in technical compliance, but it just doesn’t meet the lab test.
The administration is implying that the Supreme Court has created just enough wiggle room for it to still be in compliance, because the Court didn’t order Abrego Garcia’s actual return. I’ve seen legal analysts argue that, but you don’t think it holds water?
Put it this way: I think the administration is clearly engaged in a farce. They’re clearly disrespecting the Supreme Court order, in that the court did order them to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia, and it’s pretty clear they’re doing nothing to facilitate that. After all, the Trump administration is paying El Salvador to keep Abrego Garcia and others as prisoners. So, it’s pretty obvious that if they wanted to facilitate his return, he would be back very quickly. It just doesn’t meet the smell test, the lab test, whatever you want to call it. Ultimately, this probably goes back up to the Supreme Court.
It’s become something of a truism that Democrats will have better success on pocketbook issues than immigration issues, and that Americans are pretty largely supportive of Trump’s mass-deportation efforts and so on. With that in mind, do you think Democrats have been overly cautious in treating this as a five-alarm fire because they may be a little defensive on the immigration stuff?
Look, we can all get into a discussion about immigration policy and what more we could have done or should have done, and I think that’s a really important debate to have. What we should not be having is a debate about defending due-process rights, because what authoritarian regimes do is they begin by picking on the most vulnerable. In this case, you’re picking on somebody who was here in the United States legally at the time he was abducted, never charged with a crime, never convicted of a crime — which the vice-president accused him of.
So, I think that the issue here is protecting the rights of individuals under our Constitution, and that that’s an area where it’s not conservative to take people’s rights away. You would think that conservatives would want to protect your First Amendment rights in the case of colleges and universities. You would think that they want to protect the right to due process, and have everybody get their day in court. This should not be a conservative or liberal issue. So, I do believe this is a place that we need to stand up and fight.
Have you discussed this with your Republican colleagues at all? Have you detected any concern or disgust on their end that they won’t air publicly, or have they just been pretty quiet?
On this particular case, we’ve not. I’ve spoken very briefly to some of them, but not since the spectacle in the Oval Office. There’ll be a test when we get back into session — we’re not in session now. The Republican Senate capacity for abdicating their responsibilities under the Constitution has, so far, been bottomless. I mean, they just are AWOL while Trump shreds Article I of the Constitution and violates laws right and left.
So the question will be whether or not defiance of a court order, including a 9-0 Supreme Court order, will be enough to shake them out of their complicity. My guess right now is that, since the Trump administration has invented this charade that they’re hiding behind, Republican senators will shamelessly go along, at least for a while.
Speaking of Republican colleagues, Marco Rubio was confirmed as secretary of State with zero “no” votes from Democrats. He was seen as something of a voice of sanity in Trump’s cabinet, which included several extreme picks. But he has presided over all these radical policies. Do you regret voting for him, and what do you think is going on with him? Not that he was ever a moderate, but what do you make of his transformation into this?
I have said very publicly, and some time ago, that I very much regret voting for Marco Rubio.
Oh, I missed that.
Yeah. In fact, I’ve told all the other nominees that come before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that they have Marco Rubio to thank for the fact that I’m not going to vote for them. Because, first of all, he allowed Elon Musk to essentially dismantle USAID, right? Marco Rubio was complicit by standing on the sidelines. He did nothing about that. Even though he has been a supporter of USAID over the years, he’s totally abandoned his previous values-based principled, grounded foreign-policy views. Whatever you agree and disagree about how he applied them, he at least had the pretense that we should have a values-based foreign policy, and that’s one of the things that sets the United States apart.
But he’s clearly gone full-on Trump here. It’s like he’s had a full lobotomy. It seems to be a requirement for going into the administration. Human rights, rule of law, promoting democracy — they’ve put that all through the shredder, or the wood chipper, as Elon would say.
I put out a short video the other day in which I made the point that Marco Rubio is not conducting foreign policy. What he’s become is the student deporter-in-chief. That seems to be his portfolio now, right, violating the First Amendment rights of students and colleges and universities.
These guys proclaim this embrace of the First Amendment. Donald Trump cares about the First Amendment for himself only, and then, everybody else, they’ll punish speech that they don’t like. He has implemented that policy, and as you probably saw from the Washington Post article the other day, also lied about it. The Post did this story about the Rumeysa Ozturk case, and revealed there’s an internal State Department memo that put a lie to everything that Rubio was saying. In other words, it said that there was no basis for claiming she was undermining U.S. foreign policy or engaged in antisemitism or anything like that.
Let’s say you get stonewalled by officials in El Salvador on Wednesday, don’t get their cooperation on anything. What more can you do after that? What’s the next move?
My goal, and I know others share it, is to just keep a spotlight on the case until we reverse this injustice and bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home. I think the position of the Trump administration and the position of the government of El Salvador is unsustainable, because we have a Supreme Court decision here. You listened to the president of El Salvador. He said he didn’t have the power to smuggle Abrego Garcia into the United States. So he doesn’t have the power to smuggle him in, but he has the power to open the door and let him walk out. Attorney General Bondi said she would send a plane down.
So I want to demonstrate solidarity with his family, who has been traumatized and terrorized by this awful episode, and to keep a spotlight on the injustice of this man having been illegally abducted and put in a notorious prison. The final piece of this is that the Trump administration, as I mentioned, is paying the government of El Salvador. They want to pay $15 million to imprison these individuals. But they ultimately have to go through Congress with that request, and you can be sure that I’m not going to vote for one penny to illegally imprison Abrego Garcia.
And there are probably many others like him, too. The more reporting that comes out, the more evidence there is that this is not isolated.
Yeah. We haven’t talked about the other cases. I’ve been focused on this, partly because he’s a Marylander. Of course. You’re absolutely right — it is a much bigger issue.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
