Chris Van Hollen says ‘if we deny constitutional rights of this one man, it threatens constitutional rights of everyone’

Senator Chris Van Hollen, who travelled to El Salvador last week to meet Kilmar Ábrego García, the man at the center of a wrongful deportation dispute, said on Sunday that his trip was to support Ábrego García’s right to due process because if that was denied then everyone’s constitutional rights were threatened in the US.

The White House has claimed Ábrego García was a member of the MS-13 gang though he has not been charged with any gang related crimes and the supreme court has ordered his return to the US be facilitated.

But in an interview with ABC’s This Week, Van Hollen, a Maryland senator, stressed that the government had presented no evidence linking Ábrego García to MS-13 in federal court. “Mr President,” the senator said, “take your facts to court, don’t put everything out on social media.”