Van Hollen office/AP
When Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland announced this week that he would travel to El Salvador to push for the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man wrongfully sent to the mega-prison at the center of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans, Van Hollen was met with plenty of skepticism. Neither the United States nor El Salvador had felt compelled to show evidence that Abrego Garcia was even alive; why would they grant a Democratic senator, one not exactly prominent on the national stage, a chance to meet with him? An escalating showdown between the Trump administration and the courts over Abrego Garcia’s detention only appeared to underscore the inevitable failure of Van Hollen’s pursuit.
And resistance certainly came: Salvadoran soldiers stopped Van Hollen at a checkpoint three miles away from the mega-prison; repeated requests to meet with Abrego Garcia, even virtually, were denied. But on Thursday evening, Van Hollen’s persistence paid off.
The photo was the first piece of confirmation, amid weeks of uncertainty, that Abrego Garcia was alive. “It was very overwhelming,” Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, told ABC’s Good Morning America on Friday. “The most important thing for me, my children, his mom, his brother, his sibling, was to see him alive, and we saw him alive.”
Vasquez Sura’s relief here, delivered in a single photo, is palpable. It is at once simple and tremendous: an anguished family, after weeks of cruelty imposed by the US government, now knows that their fight for Abrego Garcia’s release had not been in vain. In fact, it will continue. “I won’t stop fighting until he returns home,” Vasquez Sura confirmed on Friday, signaling a sense of reinvigoration after Van Hollen’s meeting. Meanwhile, Trump on Friday piggybacked on Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s mockery of the successful sit-down, and attacked Van Hollen as a “GRANDSTANDER!!!” The once little-known senator, now a symbol of what it looks like to challenge this president by simply doing something, was now in Trump’s crosshairs.
