Donald Trump is furious that Senator Chris Van Hollen was able to meet with a man his administration wrongly deported to El Salvador.
In a post on Truth Social Friday morning, Trump attempted to mock the Maryland Democrat, who traveled all the way to Latin America to find Kilmar Abrego Garcia, after the Trump administration had him placed in a notorious Salvadoran prison due to an “administrative error.”
“Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone. GRANDSTANDER!!!” Trump wrote.
But Van Hollen’s public crusade to reunite with his deported constituent was precisely what allowed them to meet. Although Van Hollen was initially denied access to Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison known for human rights abuses, he’d made a strong case for being allowed access to Abrego Garcia. It’s still unclear exactly how the two were able to meet, but Van Hollen has promised to provide a “full update” on his return to the U.S.
The White House also took a shot on Van Hollen—in the most grotesque way possible.
In a post on X, Trump’s staff made a side-by-side of a photograph of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia and one of Trump meeting with Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a woman who was raped and killed by a Salvadoran man in 2023.
“We are not the same,” the post read.
The Trump administration has repeatedly trotted out Morin as a means of justifying its decision to send brown men who had nothing to do with that crime to a foreign prison.
But no one seemed more mad than El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, whom Trump paid $6 million to keep Abrego Garcia (and other deportees) in prison. He also attempted to ridicule Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garica.
“Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” Bukele wrote on X.
“Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody,” Bukele wrote in a separate post.
The Trump administration has falsely claimed that Abrego Garcia was actually a “convicted” criminal and “top leader of MS-13,” despite only presenting thin evidence of Garcia’s gang affiliation. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a blistering ruling Thursday smacking down the White House’s latest attempt to stall Abrego Garcia’s return.
“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” the three-judge panel wrote in its unanimous ruling.
“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”