Democrats do many things that I don’t understand, but their enthusiastic embrace of El Salvadoran Abrego Garcia, a member of the brutal gang MS-13, is bizarre even for them. No one disputes that Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador. No one disputes that he was in the U.S. illegally. Therefore–it follows–he should be deported to his home country. In 2019, that deportation was temporarily held up by an immigration judge who thought that it would be too dangerous to deport Garcia to El Salvador, because he could be threatened by a rival gang. That is not, to put it politely, a persuasive rationale.
The Department of Homeland Security has made public the record of Garcia’s 2019 arrest. Here it is:
So Garcia was apprehended in the company of known MS-13 members, he manifested various signs of being an MS-13 member, and a reliable informant told police that Garcia was “an active member of MS-13” with the rank of “Chequeo” and the gang name of “Chele.” The fact that an immigration judge nevertheless didn’t want him deported to his home country is outrageous.
Garcia is also a domestic abuser, but that is a relatively minor consideration for present purposes.
MS-13 is a notoriously violent gang that has terrorized American communities, raping and murdering women and children. The idea that MS-13 members who have entered the U.S. illegally should be allowed to stay here, in contravention of our laws, is absurd. And yet, that is the position of the Democratic Party.
Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland has made the most risible foreign journey since Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland. Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador, ostensibly to visit Abrego Garcia, the Democratic Party’s hero, in prison there. Predictably, Van Hollen was turned away at the prison’s entrance. Too bad: in my opinion, they should have let him in.
Van Hollen wants more MS-13 gang members in Maryland, as does the governor of that state, Wes Moore, who says he wants to bring the illegal alien Garcia “home.” Someone should tell Moore that Garcia’s home is El Salvador, the one and only country of which he is a citizen.
Patty Morin, one of Van Hollen and Moore’s constituents, has a different view:
Patty Morin, whose daughter was murdered by an undocumented [sic] migrant from El Salvador in 2023, questioned the motive of Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen traveling to that country and visiting a man who had been deported.
After Rachel Morin, a mother of five, was found murdered and raped off the Ma & Pa Trail in Harford County on August 6, 2023, Patty Morin said Sen. Van Hollen “barely acknowledged her daughter.” Victor Martinez-Hernandez, who law enforcement said had fled illegally to the United States after an arrest warrant was issued for a murder in El Salvador, was found guilty of murder on April 14.
***
“To have a senator from Maryland who didn’t even acknowledge, or barely acknowledged my daughter and the brutal death she endured, leaving her five children without a mother and now a grandbaby without a grandmother so he can use my taxpayer money to fly to El Salvador to bring back someone that’s not even an American citizen?” Morin said during a visit to the White House on Wednesday. “Why does that person have more right than I do, or my daughter, or my grandchildren?”
Good question. Van Hollen displayed extraordinary arrogance in demanding that El Salvador send its citizen into the United States. Who is he to dictate to El Salvador about an El Salvadoran citizen? El Salvador’s president, in the Oval Office, rightly ridiculed the idea that he should somehow try to smuggle one of his country’s citizens across our border, illegally.
I think it is almost 100% certain that the Democrats will win the House of Representatives in the midterm election. Their troops have been whipped into a frenzy that we have rarely seen in our history. If Democratic office-holders were merely sane, they would have the 2026 election in the bag. And yet…sanity is a bar they don’t seem able to get over. As the Abrego Garcia case illustrates, perhaps more than anything else.
