Van Hollen on Alleged MS-13, Wife-Beating, Illegal Migrant: ‘Let Him Go’

Maryland Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen, who is championing the jailed illegal migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, has some loud American advice for El Salvador’s government: “They should just let him go.”

The advice was delivered at a safe press conference in the United States, far from the busy streets of the Latin American country that until recently was wracked by MS-13 gangsters. The gang violence was wiped off the streets when the voters elected President Nayib Bukele with a mandate to restore law and order in their small country.

“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?” Van Hollen asked reporters after his April 17 meeting with Abrego Garcia. “They should just let him go.”

But when MS-13 gangsters were let go, El Salvador’s people were paralyzed by gang violence. Human Rights Watch reported in 2024:

Agustín [a teenage boy] first suffered from gang violence in Cuscatancingo, a few kilometers north of the capital. As in many areas in El Salvador, gangs controlled his neighborhood, and many aspects of his family’s lives. “It was suffocating,” his mother told us. “You had to think about what to say, how to walk and what to wear. They saw everything. It was like being with your enemy 24 hours.”

The MS-13, one of El Salvador’s most prominent gangs, tried to recruit her son when he was 12. Five adolescent gang members promised him better shoes, clothing, and cigars. Many boys from the neighborhood joined, he said, but he refused.

The gangs have recruited thousands of children. Studies show mostly join these criminal groups between ages 12 and 15. A lack of educational and economic opportunities makes it easier for gangs to recruit them, even in exchange for shoes and cigars.

Violence took a turn for the worse for Agustín in June 2021. MS-13 gang members beat his stepfather and threatened to kill his mother, a community leader, after she helped police distribute food during the Covid-19 pandemic. “Talking to the police or a soldier was like a death sentence,” she said.

Van Hollen and Democrats are also ignoring the growing evidence that Abrega Garcia beat his wife,  served as a street hustler in Maryland for the  MS-13 gang, and helped smuggle more illegal migrants into the jobs and housing needed by Van Hollen’s constituents.

They are also ignoring the vast civic and economic damage imposed on hundreds of millions of ordinary Americans by the establishment’s quasi-colonialist economic policy of Extraction Migration.

President Trump’s top aide, Stephen Miller, offered the GOP’s rejoinder to Van Hollen in an impromptu press conference on Friday:

“I’m almost at a loss for words,” Miller said, adding:

The man who has been deported to his home country of El Salvador, who has been repeatedly documented by multiple federal and state authorities to be a member of MS-13, one of the most violent and ruthless criminal organizations on planet Earth — which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization — and an individual who has been incredibly implicated in human smuggling and human trafficking, an individual who is a documented woman-beater, somebody who is viciously assaulted a woman in ways that shock the human conscience. That is who the Democrat Party is going to provide aid, solace, and comfort to?

Not to Senator Van Hollen’s constituents, like the Morin family. Rachel Morin own viciously beaten, brutally raped and murdered, and her mother never even got a phone call from Senator Van Hollen.

[Or] Kayla Hamilton, a young girl who was attacked in a public restaurant, raped in the bathroom, and beaten to death and murdered by an illegal alien that Joe Biden set free into the country.

None of those people elicits human sympathy from Senator Van Hollen. How broken is that man’s heart? How broken is his conscience that he doesn’t have even an ounce of empathy or time or concern to share with those families? How many of his citizen constituents have been killed by the fentanyl that Joe Biden allowed into this country by the cartels that made a fortune off of human trafficking, smuggling into this country?

Or the children in his state, they cannot even get a good education or good health care because of the mass migration that has occurred into his state. None of that concerns him in the least.

“His heart is reserved for an illegal alien who’s a member of a foreign terrorist organization — I’m beyond appalled,” Miller said.

“That is a big, big lie,” Van Hollen said about the GOP criticism: “I for one, have been fighting…gang violence, especially MS-13, for over 20 years, probably for longer than Donald Trump ever uttered those words ‘MS-13.'”