Sen. Chris Van Hollen on Sunday repeatedly dodged questions about whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia was an MS-13 gang member as the Trump administration has alleged, despite being asked directly on CNN’s “State of the Union” if he could say “with absolute certainty” that the deported illegal migrant did not belong to MS-13.
When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Van Hollen, “Can you say with absolute certainty that he is not, nor has he ever been a member of the MS-13 gang,” the Maryland Democrat said that “what Donald Trump is trying to do here is change the subject. The subject at hand is that he and his administration are defying a court order to give Abrego Garcia his due process rights.”
Van Hollen emphasized that ‘”they are trying to litigate on social media what they should be doing in the courts. They need to put up or shut up in the courts.”
When Bash persisted, saying, “Since you were the one person to have met with him and since this is a thing, you say, on social media, it’s what we hear from Donald Trump and Republicans every day all day long, you didn’t ask him,” Van Hollen said, “I didn’t ask him that because I know what his answer is.
“What he told me was he was sad and traumatized that he was being imprisoned because he has committed no crimes.”
The senator then went on to point out that Trump’s argument is you can’t fight gang violence “and at the same time uphold people’s constitutional rights. That’s a very dangerous view. And if we deny the constitutional rights of this one man, it threatens the constitutional rights of everybody in America.”
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