Senator Van Hollen Went To El Salvador And All He Got Was ... Nah F*ck This

Per the White House, Kilmar Abrego Garcia now the *emperor pope* of MS-13.

Video screenshot, MSNBC on YouTube

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) traveled to El Salvador in an attempt to check on the welfare of his constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the Department of Homeland Security sent to El Salvador’s torture prison because of an “administrative error.” Abrego Garcia, who was in the US legally and has never been charged with a crime, was abducted and possibly imprisoned forever, without a hearing, a month ago, along with more than 200 other immigrants sent to the torture prison without due process.

Since then federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have ordered the Trump administration to return him to the US, but Donald Trump and his own criminal gang have refused to comply. Instead, they have constantly insisted they don’t need to listen to judges, and have ramped up their evidence-free claims that Abrego Garcia is a dangerous terrorist MS-13 gang member, no, an actual gang leader, whose return to the US would endanger everyone.

Not surprisingly, Van Hollen wasn’t allowed to meet with or even place a phone call to Abrego Garcia, but he was able to meet with Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa, who said that El Salvador “can’t” return Abrego Garcia, explaining that the US is paying for his permanent detention without charges, trial, or even a hearing. Heck, contracts are sacred, unless they’re between the US government and anyone Trump decides not to pay.

In a presser after that meeting, Van Hollen said to reporters,

“Why is the government of El Salvador continuing to imprison a man where they have no evidence that he’s committed any crime and they have not been provided any evidence from the United States that he has committed any crime? […] They should just let him go.”

Van Hollen, still in El Salvador, was also interviewed by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last night; he said the US Embassy in El Salvador informed him it hadn’t received any request from the administration to request Abrego Garcia’s release, despite the Supreme Court’s order to “facilitate” his release. No real surprises there. Here’s that interview:

Van Hollen consistently emphasized that Abrego Garcia had been abducted by the US and imprisoned without a trial or hearing, to push back on the administration’s narrative that any of this is remotely legal. He also pointed out, again, that the administration “admitted, itself, to a judge, that this was a mistake, but instead of fixing the mistake, they fired the Justice Department lawyer who admitted it was a mistake.”

And yes, that’s exactly what the administration did, and then lied about it, too; Trump immigration Obersturmbannführer Stephen Miller insisted Monday during Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele that “The only mistake that was made is a lawyer put an incorrect line in a legal filing that since has been relieved of duty.” See? No mistake, YOU’RE the mistake and you will be punished for telling the truth.

Maddow also showed photos of Republican members of Congress who were able to visit the prison so they could pose for propaganda photos in front of the cells. Rep. Riley Moore (R-West Virginia), even posed while giving an Abu Ghraib-style double thumbs-up, apparently in front of the same group of Salvadoran prisoners (not the mostly Venezuelan migrants expelled from the US) used as human props for Kristi Noem’s Nazi propaganda video a few weeks back. This time the guards didn’t order them to take their shirts off to show their scary gang tattoos.

It’s a little telling that Republican fans of torture prisons can waltz in to show off in front of prisoners crammed into stacked bunks like they were in Dachau, while a Democratic lawmaker is prevented from finding out anything about the safety of a man who shouldn’t be there at all. (Again, none of the people Trump is paying to be kept there should be, since they were denied the basic right of due process.)

Rather than complying with the Supreme Court, and on the verge of being held in criminal contempt for its actions, the Trump administration ramped up its propaganda efforts to lie about Abrego Garcia and the other people it illegally sent to El Salvador under the pretense that the United States is at “war” with criminal gangs. (Remember kids, everything about this operation is illegal as fuck.)

The senator also called attention to the lawless actions of the Trump administration in refusing to return Abrego Garcia, saying, “We have an unjust situation here. The Trump administration is lying about Abrego Garcia. The American courts have looked at the facts.”

So let’s just review those facts, to get the worst lies (so far) out of the way:

Kilmar Abrego Garcia hasn’t been convicted of any crime. According to court documents filed in 2019, he fled El Salvador at the age of 16 in or around 2011 to escape threats from Barrio 18, a gang that he’d refused to join after it tried to extort money from his mother’s pupusa business.

He entered the US without documentation and went to live in Maryland with his brother, who’d also fled the gang. In 2019, he was arrested — by a very hinky cop — outside a Home Depot and accused of being a gang member because he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie. Yes, really. A confidential informant allegedly told police that Abrego Garcia was “an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique,” which operates out of Long Island, New York, where Abrego Garcia has never lived.

The Trump administration’s claim that he is an “adjudicated” member of MS-13 stems solely from that accusation and the fact that immigration judges declined to release him on bail. In other words, the claim is bullshit — it has never been upheld by any court.

Ultimately, the immigration judge who decided Abrego Garcia’s case determined that Abrego Garcia had provided credible testimony to support his claim for asylum on the basis that he would be in danger if returned to El Salvador.

However, he couldn’t be granted asylum because he hadn’t applied within one year of arriving in the US, a hard limit on such claims. So instead the judge issued a “withholding from removal” order to prohibit Abrego Garcia from being deported to El Salvador, and to allow him to work in the USA. He’s also married to a US citizen, not that that has been of any help in his case.

The lie that Abrego Garcia is a “terrorist” is similarly bullshit; that’s based on Trump’s declaration that MS-13, Tren de Aragua, and other Latin American gangs are terrorist groups. But the administration has never once proved that he was affiliated with MS-13, and again, he’s never been charged or convicted of any crime.

That hasn’t kept the administration from lying loudly about him, to the point of hyperbole. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt completely made up a claim that he had engaged in “human trafficking,” because why not? Attorney General Pam Bondi lied that he was “one of the top members of MS-13,” although the dirty cop’s informant only said he was one level above a new recruit (and theMS-13 claim was rejected altogether by the judge in his 2019 case). JD Vance lied that he was a “convicted MS-13 gang member,” and Homeland Security spokesliar Tricia McLaughlin said that he was a whole lot like Osama bin Laden, insisting, “The media would love for you to believe he’s a media darling, that he’s just a Maryland father. Well, Osama bin Laden was also a father and yet he wasn’t a good guy, and they actually are both terrorists.”

The lies have even extended to court documents when that seemed convenient:

In a filing submitted to the U.S. District Court for Maryland that same day, DHS Acting General Counsel Joseph Mazzara wrote that Abrego Garcia’s withholding from removal is invalid “because of his membership in MS-13, which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.”

That’s a hell of a lot of lies, and Homeland Security helpfully repackaged the lies in a press release Monday — without any support of course. The White House even posted a remarkable attack on Senator Van Hollen yesterday, accusing him of being unconcerned about crimes by undocumented immigrants in a big list of whataboutism, and insisting in a literally boldfaced lie that “The criminal illegal immigrant is already home — he’s a Salvadoran citizen.”

In the latest line of bullshit, Trump’s “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka hinted that anyone who talks about the due process rights of Abrego Garcia just might be begging to be prosecuted for “aiding and abetting a terrorist,” because criminal terrorist aliens do not have no rights anymore, and neither do other enemies of America, which presumably includes all nine members of the Supreme Court.

Hey, if they can lie so much about an innocent man and send him to prison forever, why wouldn’t they lie about the rest of us and send us away too?

---

Not A Nice Time: Day 34 Of Kilmar Abrego Garcia And 237 Others In No-Due-Process El Salvador Torture Jail

Oops, ICE Did A Boo-Boo! Oh Well, Enjoy Slavery Prison In El Salvador, Innocent Guy!

Roberts Court Making Up New Laws For Trump Again

---

[AP / Democracy Docket / CNN / New Republic / Rolling Stone]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if a one-time donation works better, here’s the button for that!