Chris Van Hollen Is Angry—at Trump, and at His Party’s Lame Pollsters

Bacon: You said a lot of great things here. Let me follow up. OK—so you’re thinking about going to El Salvador. Do you think, in your head, Hakeem Jeffries probably doesn’t want me to do this, the polling says we shouldn’t raise the salience of immigration compared to health care? Or do you think, this is so important I have to do it anyway?

Senator Van Hollen: I was angry and I just on luck decided to go because I do believe fundamentally that when you violate one person’s right to due process, you put the rights of everybody at risk. And so what actually happened was Bukele, who by the way calls himself the world’s coolest dictator, was meeting with Trump in the White House. You may remember that scene. And when he came here, I wrote to the ambassador from El Salvador and I said, I want to talk to Bukele while he’s here in Washington about Kilmar Armando Ábrego García who just got disappeared by the Trump administration and is in CECOT. Well, they blew me off. I wrote in that letter that if he didn’t meet with me here, I was going to go there. So I got on the plane, went down there. At first they refused to let me meet with him. We got in the car, we tried to see the CECOT, they actually set up a roadblock with soldiers specifically to prevent me from reaching him.

When we came back to San Salvador, I had a press event and there a lot of local press there and pointed out that the Salvadorian government was violating international law by denying him access to talking to his wife, his lawyer. And lo and behold, a few hours later I got to see him and I got to call his wife later on, Jennifer, to hear that he was alive.