During a visit to El Salvador, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) met with Kilmar Ábrego García — the Maryland resident and Salvadoran man who was deported from the United States and is still locked up in a Salvadoran prison. President Donald Trump and his allies are claiming that García is associated with the violent Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang, but García’s relatives and defenders are countering that there is no evidence linking him to MS-13 and that he was deported without any type of due process.
Van Hollen, now back in the United States, discussed García’s case during a Monday, April 21 appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” And he emphasizes that the implications of the case go way beyond García himself.
The Democratic U.S. senator told “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski and their colleague Jonathan Lemire, “The whole point here that we’re making is that the Trump Administration needs to respect the Constitution of the United States when you threaten the rights of one man like Ábrego García, take away the rights of one man like Ábrego García, you threaten the rights for everybody.”
Van Hollen noted that the U.S. Supreme Court, in an 9-0 decision, unanimously upheld a lower federal court ruling ordering the Trump Administration to “facilitate” García’s return to the United States.
“In this case, the Trump Administration is flouting the law, because the Supreme Court, on a 9 to 0 ruling, said that they had to facilitate the return of Ábrego García,” Van Hollen told Scarbrough, Brzezinski and Lemire. “I was just down there, as you said. I met with them, the embassy — the Trump Administration is doing nothing right now to comply with that court order. What they’re doing is trying to change the subject as if you can’t comply with the Constitution and fight gang violence.”
Van Hollen continued, “I’ve been fighting MS-13 longer than Donald Trump probably ever uttered the words. I put together an anti-gang task force in this Washington region: Maryland, Washington, Virginia. So, the notion that fighting gangs requires that you shred the Constitution and deny people’s rights is just the dangerous spin that Donald Trump is putting on all of this…. We’re fighting for the rule of law. And if you take it away, as I said, for one person, you threaten it for all.”
In El Salvador, García was initially held in the maximum-security prison CECOT, which stands for Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorísmo in Spanish (Center for the Confinement of Terrorism in English).
When Lemire asked Van Hollen how García was doing, the senator replied, “When he was first moved to CECOT, he was in a cell with about 25 other prisoners. He wasn’t scared about the other prisoners in his cell, but he was traumatized by the prisoners in other cells who taunted him. And these other cells were just packed with prisoners. He has been moved subsequently to a place with better conditions, but again, is in a total news blackout and unable to communicate with anybody.”
Source: Alternet / Digpu NewsTex