Chris Van Hollen has spent almost a decade as an under-the-radar lawmaker. However the Maryland Democrat, who gave up a management trajectory within the Home to serve within the Senate, might now lastly be assembly his second.
Van Hollen has grabbed the nationwide highlight amid a two-day journey to El Salvador to fulfill with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration on faulty expenses of gang membership. After being initially blocked from getting into a maximum-security jail by the Salvadoran authorities, Van Hollen finally succeeded in sitting down Thursday together with his constituent, who had since been transferred to a different detention facility.
“If you happen to deny the constitutional rights of 1 man, you threaten the constitutional rights and due course of for everybody else in America,” Van Hollen stated Friday at a press convention at Dulles Worldwide Airport, shortly after getting back from El Salvador.
He was flanked by advocates holding indicators emblazoned with the phrases, “Thanks Senator Van Hollen.”
The episode has vaulted Van Hollen into a brand new hero of the so-called resistance, with some progressives now seeing the 66-year-old lawmaker as somebody who can present a roadmap for tips on how to combat President Donald Trump and successfully message in regards to the human penalties of the administration’s immigration crackdown.
“We’re not within the majority, and we don’t management the legislative agenda on the ground; we now have to take no matter artistic steps we will exterior of the conventional course of enterprise to affect occasions,” stated Home Judiciary rating member Jamie Raskin, Van Hollen’s successor in representing the suburban Washington district that’s dwelling to a large Salvadoran inhabitants. “Van Hollen’s journey down there undoubtedly helped to provoke individuals’s consideration and to maintain it within the entrance of everyone’s thoughts.”
It’s additionally the newest leg of a protracted journey for Van Hollen that would now change the course of his profession at a second when Democrats are simply beginning to focus on the necessity for generational change atop the management ladder.
“We’ve been flailing since Trump gained. I’d be mendacity if I stated morale wasn’t shot over right here,” stated one Democratic aide for the Senate International Relations Committee, of which Van Hollen is a member.
“The Dems actually need one thing to rally the troops,” stated the aide, granted anonymity to talk candidly. “[Sen. Cory] Booker’s ground speech did that. Van Hollen’s journey is doing that.”
Democrats have discovered unity in opposing a lot of Trump’s coverage priorities, however they’ve additionally struggled to get on the identical web page on quite a lot of points since shedding the White Home, together with immigration. They’ve additionally privately and publicly griped over their occasion’s incapacity to tamp down the lighting velocity at which Trump’s MAGA agenda has upended norms whereas flouting Congress and the courts.
Van Hollen’s strikes to defy the president — and tackle a private security danger by going to El Salvador — have handed Democrats an antidote to a few of their doom and gloom. Many progressives additionally contemplate Van Hollen’s framing of Abrego Garcia’s plight an instance of the kind of the principled stand on immigration that would assist win again disaffected voters.
“If ever Democrats had been on the lookout for a robust place to select a combat on immigration — the whisking individuals off the streets with out due course of … [this] is the place to select the combat,” stated Adam Inexperienced, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Marketing campaign Committee.
Leah Greenberg, the cofounder of the anti-Trump advocacy group Indivisible, echoed the sentiment.
“This demonstrates that Democrats are shifting to an alternate place, which is that, in the event you take a transparent stance and also you robustly defend it, you deliver individuals together with you,” stated Greenberg, whose group has been pushing Democrats to be extra aggressive of their opposition to Trump.
Abrego Garcia was deported final month regardless of a choose’s ruling that he be allowed to stay in america as a result of he confronted a danger of being focused by a gang in his homeland. A federal choose has since ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return and the Supreme Court docket has upheld the order.
However whereas Trump administration officers have acknowledged their error, they’re refusing take steps to rectify the state of affairs and have since doubled down in saying Abrego Garcia should stay in El Salvador. The episode has erupted in a political firestorm, with Van Hollen now within the eye.
“By the way in which, @ChrisVanHollen — he’s NOT coming again,” the White Home posted Friday on social media.
El Salvador’s president and a staunch Trump ally, Nayib Bukele, additionally piled on.
“Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘demise camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen within the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” he posted on X with pictures of the 2 assembly at a restaurant. There isn’t any proof that Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia had been consuming cocktails.
Van Hollen was elected to the Home in 2003, the place he rose by way of the ranks to guide the occasion marketing campaign arm by way of prime cycles and function the senior Democrat on the Funds Committee — each positions to which he was appointed by Nancy Pelosi, then the Home Democratic chief.
He was a member of Pelosi’s prolonged management circle for years, and there was in depth reporting in regards to the Californian’s curiosity in positioning Van Hollen to succeed her when the time got here to step apart. However when then-Sen. Barbara Mikulski introduced she would retire in 2016, Van Hollen selected the consolation of a Senate seat over the gamble of remaining within the Home with no assure of a promotion.
Within the Senate, Van Hollen spent one time period as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Marketing campaign Committee however has in any other case served extra quietly within the rank-and-file, his choices restricted in a caucus that steadily rewards seniority over ambition.
Nonetheless, Van Hollen has additionally lengthy been a champion of a human rights-centered overseas coverage platform, even when it’s meant breaking together with his personal occasion or difficult U.S. allies. As an example, he emerged as a number one Senate critic of the Israeli authorities’s conduct through the conflict in Gaza, accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of committing conflict crimes and urging then-President Joe Biden to withhold assist.
“If you realize Senator Van Hollen, you realize he’s notably obsessed with worldwide points,” stated fellow Maryland Democratic Rep. Sarah Elfreth. Individually, Raskin floated the chance that Van Hollen may have been on “a really brief record” to be Secretary of State if former Vice President Kamala Harris had gained the presidency.
On the airport press convention Friday, Van Hollen nodded to his colleagues who had been additionally exploring visits to El Salvador — and maybe their very own moments within the highlight.
“I’ve instructed the vp of El Salvador however I could be the primary senator — the primary member of Congress — to come back all the way down to El Salvador, however I gained’t be the final,” he stated. “There are others coming.”
Booker, who captured the nation’s consideration when he just lately broke the report for the longest speaking filibuster on the Senate ground to protest Trump’s agenda, has stated he’s planning his personal journey. Democratic Reps. Delia Ramirez of Illinois, Maxwell Frost of Florida and Robert Garcia of California have requested Republican committee chairs to arrange official delegations, however Mark Inexperienced of Homeland Safety and James Comer of Oversight have declined.
In an indication of how a lot the episode has change into a partisan flashpoint, Ramirez stated in an announcement that her “Republican colleagues have continued to strengthen their complicity,” whereas Comer instructed Frost and Garcia in a letter they had been welcome to “spend your personal cash” to drink “margaritas garnished with cherry slices with a overseas gang member.”
Van Hollen, on the press convention, dismissed accusations of “Margaritagate,” saying, “no one drank any margaritas, or sugar water, or no matter,” and that prop drinks had been positioned on the desk by Salvadoran authorities officers to create an a misunderstanding.
In ready remarks he stated he drafted on the airplane dwelling, he emphasised the authorized rights that had not been afforded to Abrego Garcia and pledged to proceed the combat to deliver him again to Maryland, and that each the Trump administration and the federal government of El Salvador are complicit in an “unlawful scheme.”
“This shouldn’t be a difficulty for Republicans or Democrats,” Van Hollen stated. “This is a matter for each American who cares about our structure, who cares about particular person liberty, who cares about due course of and who cares about what makes America so completely different, which is adherence to all these items. That is an American problem.”
Connor O’Brien, Joe Gould, Robbie Gramer and Ali Bianco contributed to this report.
