Senator Chris Van Hollen accused Donald Trump and the Republican Party of throwing the US into a constitutional crisis on Sunday by ignoring court orders and attempting to litigate the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia on social media.
Abrego Garcia remains in a Salvadoran prison after a visit by Van Hollen over the weekend ended in the senator delivering the first real confirmation of the deported Maryland man’s status and whereabouts.
The senator also reported that Abrego Garcia informed him that he’d been transferred away from the notorious CECOT prison, which Republicans including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem have lauded for its harsh conditions, but that which critics say violate international human rights laws and standards.
On Sunday, Van Hollen completed a whirlwind tour of all the major broadcast networks as he appeared across the five biggest interview programs: Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday and State of the Union.
In interviews, he repeated his assertion that allowing the Trump administration to trample Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s due process rights, which the Supreme Court has ruled apply to everyone in the United States regardless of citizenship, would open the door to violations of those rights for natural-born American citizens.
“If we deny the constitutional rights of this one man, it threatens the constitutional rights of everybody in America,” the Maryland Democrat told CNN’s Dana Bash.
The US, he said in multiple interviews, had entered a period of constitutional crisis. Van Hollen pointed to the White House’s continuing refusal to press the government of El Salvador to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. The Trump administration, he said, was ignoring an order from the Supreme Court to “facilitate” the man’s return — doing “nothing” instead — while taunting Democrats on social media.
“I’m okay with whatever the rule of law dictates. But right now, we have a lawless president,” Van Hollen said. “We have a lawless president who is ignoring the order of the Supreme Court of the United States to facilitate his return.”
“The subject at hand is that he and his administration are defying a court order to give Abrego Garcia his due process rights. They are trying to litigate on social media what they should be doing in the courts,” he said on CNN.
Republicans weren’t the only ones complaining about Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia.
Even as a contingent of House Democrats sought Mike Johnson’s permission to lead an official congressional delegation to El Salvador (which was denied), some centrist members of the senator’s party have dismissively called the furor around the growing legal fight a distraction. One of them is Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who is thought to be considering a 2028 run for president.
Newsom called the issue the “distraction of the day” in a recent podcast interview.
The Democratic senator, back in Washington from San Salvador and receiving a surge of support from Democratic voters in his home state and across the country, had a scathing response for the governor and others in his party who’ve vented their frustrations to reporters and friendly media outlets.
“Anyone who is not prepared to stand up and fight for the Constitution doesn’t deserve to lead,” he said in repeated interviews.
Born in El Salvador, Abrego Garcia applied for asylum in 2019 and was granted an order barring his deportation to El Salvador after a judge ruled that he had a “well-founded fear” of facing retaliation from gangs and other local groups. In that asylum case, the judge similarly heard and rejected the entirety of the government’s evidence, which federal attorneys said supported the position that he was a gang member — an arrest report from a police officer claimed that a confidential tip pointed to Abrego Garcia’s gang affiliation. He was never charged over that arrest, which occurred after officers spotted him loitering outside a Home Depot looking for work.
The White House and the government of El Salvador, run by the Trump-loving Nayib Bukele, have continued to taunt Democrats and Abrego Garcia’s family over the Easter weekend as Democrats turn to the courts to see whether the Judicial Branch will try to force compliance with the Supreme Court’s 9-0 ruling.
In an Oval Office meeting with Trump last week, Bukele escalated the unfounded smear campaign against Abrego Garcia, calling him a “terrorist” despite neither the authorities in the US nor El Salvador being willing to make the same allegation under oath.
