Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, in the first week of the Senate’s two-week recess, risked his life to try to bring home Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Virginia’s senior senator, Mark Warner has been puttering around the state doing grip-and-grins with locals around the occasional roundtable discussion with important people in business suits.
Tim Kaine, the junior senator, spent the week in Europe.
He did make a stop in Ukraine, which is something.
Advantage: yeah, obviously, Chris Van Hollen.
ICYMI
“As the federal courts have said, we need to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia home to protect his constitutional rights to due process. And it’s also important that people understand this case is not just about one man. It’s about protecting the constitutional rights of everybody who resides in the United States of America. If you deny the constitutional right of one man, you threaten the constitutional rights and due process for everyone else in America,” Van Hollen told reporters, and the nation, at a press conference on Friday, detailing his journey to El Salvador to try to meet with Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who fled political violence in his native country in 2011 and is a resident of Maryland, married to a U.S. citizen and the father of three.
The way things are going with this stuff right now, you wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that the Salvadorans would have locked Van Hollen in a prison cell just for trying to get a visit with Abrego Garcia.
Consider there that Donald Trump’s official response to the news that prison officials in El Salvador have moved Abrego Garcia from the notorious CECOT gulag to a detention center outside the country’s capital, San Salvador, was to post a photo of Abrego Garcia’s left hand doctored to make it appear that he has an MS-13 tattoo, and to complain on social media that Van Hollen is a “GRANDSTANDER” – the caps, of course, his.
This, as we’re learning more about why El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has interest in working with the Trump administration to offshore Trump’s political prisoners.
A piece in The New Yorker published on Friday details the deep ties between the Bukele regime and MS-13 leaders, which has the leaders of the trans-national gang demanded “financial benefits,” “control of territory,” “less restrictive prison conditions,” “legislative and judicial changes,” and a promise from Bukele to refuse to extradite the gang leaders to the U.S. for prosecution, in exchange for agreeing to kill fewer people, “which politically benefitted the government of El Salvador, by creating the perception that the government was reducing the murder rate.”
Trump thinks he has this Bukele guy over a barrel, so he’s getting the president of the tiny, impoverished Latin American nation – population: 6.3 million, average monthly family income: $700.94 – to do his dirty work with the political prisoners.
The way these kinds of things tend to work out, it won’t take much for cracks in their unholy alliance to appear – and we may have just seen the first one, with Van Hollen getting a one-on-one with Abrego Garcia on Thursday, which even surprised the senator, who was on his way to the airport to fly back to the U.S. when he got the call that he could get a meeting with the prisoner.
This is what the job of U.S. senator requires, and our guys, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, need to take note here.
I’m all for senators traipsing across the state to meet with constituent groups to hear their concerns and backpacking through Europe, but in the here and now, the biggest concern has to be, if Trump 2.0 can get away with disappearing Kilmar Abrego Garcia into a Latin American sewer, how long is it before any of the rest of us end up facing the same fate?
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Chris Graham
