Four more Democratic lawmakers have landed in El Salvador as the party ramps up its efforts to secure the release of a Maryland man the Trump administration now admits it erred in deporting.

Democratic Reps. Robert Garcia of California, Maxwell Frost of Florida, Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Maxine Dexter of Oregon are demanding the White House abide by a court order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. They’re planning to meet with officials at the U.S. embassy in El Salvador to advocate for Abrego Garcia’s release and to get information on other detainees transferred to El Salvador from the U.S.

Frost, in a statement, accused the Trump administration of “running a government-funded kidnapping program — illegally arresting, jailing, and deporting innocent people with zero due process,” of which Abrego Garcia is the “latest victim.”

“What happened to Kilmar Abrego Garcia is not just one family’s nightmare — it is a constitutional crisis that should outrage every single one of us,” Dexter said in a separate statement. “We will not rest while due process is discarded, and our constitutional rights are ignored.”

Their trip follows the high-profile visit from Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who traveled to El Salvador last week to meet with Abrego Garcia, and more Democratic lawmakers could follow. Democrats say the Trump administration is denying Abrego Garcia his right of due process, and of plunging the country into a constitutional crisis by ignoring the Supreme Court order to bring him back. President Donald Trump and his allies are continuing to link Abrego Garcia to the MS-13 gang member, even as a federal judge said the Justice Department has offered no evidence to that effect.

House Republicans last week denied Democrats’ requests to send an official delegation to the country, arguing it would “waste taxpayer dollars.” The Democratic lawmakers said they are not using taxpayer dollars to fund their trip.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Sunday pushed back on David Hogg’s effort to fund primary challengers against select Democrats in deep blue seats, arguing in favor of a more efficient allocation of party resources.

“Here’s the thing,” Jeffries told Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week.” “I’m gonna really focus on trying to defeat Republican incumbents so we can take back control of the House of Representatives and begin the process of ending this national nightmare that’s being visited upon us by far-right extremism.”

Leaders We Deserve, an organization co-founded by Hogg, now the Democratic National Committee vice chair, last week said it would shell out $20 million to younger, more progressive challengers of Democratic incumbents in safe blue seats.

The resultant schism has pitted Hogg and allies looking to inject fresh faces and enthusiasm into the party against key Democrats and insiders who are preaching unity and believe that money could be spent on winning back the House majority.

But on Sunday, Hogg told Karl during an ABC panel discussion that his initiative had two goals, resolving friction within the party and energizing American voters by “giving people something to vote for.”

“We cannot just be the party that is against Donald Trump,” Hogg said. “We have to be a party that doesn’t have a 27 percent approval rating from our own base. That is not a survivable future. And the way that we change that is making sure that we have some different characters.”

Former Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, also on the panel, attacked the Democrats by saying he agreed that they needed a fresh message but added if Hogg were working for him: “I mean, unfortunately, David, I’d have you removed from the party.”

Donna Brazile, who chaired the DNC throughout the 2016 election, urged Hogg to exercise caution in deciding which primary challengers to fund.

“My position is many of these so-called safe blue seats, and I can get in trouble, many of them are seats that women and minorities finally had an opportunity to come and sit in because there were no seats at the table for us,” she said at the panel Sunday. “So before you start wiping clean the menu and the plates and the seats, be very careful.”

But Hogg defended the initiative. Messaging is only part of the battle, he told Karl.

“You can have Shakespeare write the best script in the world,” Hogg said. “If you have bad actors, it doesn’t matter.”

Chris Van Hollen has spent nearly a decade as an under-the-radar lawmaker. But the Maryland Democrat, who gave up a leadership trajectory in the House to serve in the Senate, may now finally be meeting his moment.

Van Hollen has grabbed the national spotlight amid a two-day trip to El Salvador to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration on erroneous charges of gang membership. After being initially blocked from entering a maximum-security prison by the Salvadoran government, Van Hollen ultimately succeeded in sitting down Thursday with his constituent, who had since been transferred to another detention facility.

“If you deny the constitutional rights of one man, you threaten the constitutional rights and due process for everyone else in America,” Van Hollen said Friday at a press conference at Dulles International Airport, shortly after returning from El Salvador.

He was flanked by advocates holding signs emblazoned with the words, “Thank you Senator Van Hollen.”

The episode has vaulted Van Hollen into a new hero of the so-called resistance, with some progressives now seeing the 66-year-old lawmaker as someone who can provide a roadmap for how to fight President Donald Trump and effectively message about the human consequences of the administration’s immigration crackdown.

“We’re not in the majority, and we don’t control the legislative agenda on the floor; we have to take whatever creative steps we can outside of the normal course of business to influence events,” said House Judiciary ranking member Jamie Raskin, Van Hollen’s successor in representing the suburban Washington district that’s home to a sizable Salvadoran population. “Van Hollen’s trip down there definitely helped to galvanize people’s attention and to keep it in the front of everybody’s mind.”

It’s also the latest leg of a long journey for Van Hollen that could now change the course of his career at a moment when Democrats are just starting to discuss the need for generational change atop the leadership ladder.

“We’ve been flailing since Trump won. I’d be lying if I said morale wasn’t shot over here,” said one Democratic aide for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of which Van Hollen is a member.

“The Dems really need something to rally the troops,” said the aide, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “[Sen. Cory] Booker’s floor speech did that. Van Hollen’s trip is doing that.”

Democrats have found unity in opposing many of Trump’s policy priorities, but they’ve also struggled to get on the same page on a variety of issues since losing the White House, including immigration. They’ve also privately and publicly griped over their party’s inability to tamp down the lighting speed at which Trump’s MAGA agenda has upended norms while flouting Congress and the courts.

Van Hollen’s moves to defy the president — and take on a personal safety risk by going to El Salvador — have handed Democrats an antidote to some of their doom and gloom. Many progressives also consider Van Hollen’s framing of Abrego Garcia’s plight an example of the type of the principled stand on immigration that could help win back disaffected voters.

“If ever Democrats were looking for a strong place to pick a fight on immigration — the whisking people off the streets without due process … [this] is the place to pick the fight,” said Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

Leah Greenberg, the cofounder of the anti-Trump advocacy group Indivisible, echoed the sentiment.

“This demonstrates that Democrats are moving to an alternate position, which is that, if you take a clear stance and you robustly defend it, you bring people along with you,” said Greenberg, whose group has been pushing Democrats to be more aggressive in their opposition to Trump.

Abrego Garcia was deported last month despite a judge’s ruling that he be allowed to remain in the United States because he faced a risk of being targeted by a gang in his homeland. A federal judge has since ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return and the Supreme Court has upheld the order.

But while Trump administration officials have acknowledged their error, they are refusing take steps to rectify the situation and have since doubled down in saying Abrego Garcia must remain in El Salvador. The episode has erupted in a political firestorm, with Van Hollen now in the eye.

“By the way, @ChrisVanHollen — he’s NOT coming back,” the White House posted Friday on social media.

El Salvador’s president and a staunch Trump ally, Nayib Bukele, also piled on.

“Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” he posted on X with photos of the two meeting at a restaurant. There is no evidence that Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia were drinking cocktails.

Van Hollen was elected to the House in 2003, where he rose through the ranks to lead the party campaign arm through top cycles and serve as the senior Democrat on the Budget Committee — both positions to which he was appointed by Nancy Pelosi, then the House Democratic leader.

He was a member of Pelosi’s extended leadership circle for years, and there was extensive reporting about the Californian’s interest in positioning Van Hollen to succeed her when the time came to step aside. But when then-Sen. Barbara Mikulski announced she would retire in 2016, Van Hollen chose the comfort of a Senate seat over the gamble of remaining in the House with no guarantee of a promotion.

In the Senate, Van Hollen spent one term as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee but has otherwise served more quietly in the rank-and-file, his options limited in a caucus that frequently rewards seniority over ambition.

However, Van Hollen has also long been a champion of a human rights-centered foreign policy platform, even when it’s meant breaking with his own party or challenging U.S. allies. For instance, he emerged as a leading Senate critic of the Israeli government’s conduct during the war in Gaza, accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of committing war crimes and urging then-President Joe Biden to withhold aid.

“If you know Senator Van Hollen, you know he is particularly passionate about international issues,” said fellow Maryland Democratic Rep. Sarah Elfreth. Separately, Raskin floated the possibility that Van Hollen could have been on “a very short list” to be Secretary of State if former Vice President Kamala Harris had won the presidency.

At the airport press conference Friday, Van Hollen nodded to his colleagues who were also exploring visits to El Salvador — and perhaps their own moments in the spotlight.

“I’ve told the vice president of El Salvador but I might be the first senator — the first member of Congress — to come down to El Salvador, but I won’t be the last,” he said. “There are others coming.”

Booker, who captured the nation’s attention when he recently broke the record for the longest talking filibuster on the Senate floor to protest Trump’s agenda, has said he is planning his own trip. Democratic Reps. Delia Ramirez of Illinois, Maxwell Frost of Florida and Robert Garcia of California have asked Republican committee chairs to organize official delegations, but Mark Green of Homeland Security and James Comer of Oversight have declined.

In a sign of how much the episode has become a partisan flashpoint, Ramirez said in a statement that her “Republican colleagues have continued to reinforce their complicity,” while Comer told Frost and Garcia in a letter they were welcome to “spend your own money” to drink “margaritas garnished with cherry slices with a foreign gang member.”

Van Hollen, at the press conference, dismissed accusations of “Margaritagate,” saying, “nobody drank any margaritas, or sugar water, or whatever,” and that prop drinks were placed on the table by Salvadoran government officials to create an a false impression.

In prepared remarks he said he drafted on the airplane home, he emphasized the legal rights that had not been afforded to Abrego Garcia and pledged to continue the fight to bring him back to Maryland, and that both the Trump administration and the government of El Salvador are complicit in an “illegal scheme.”

“This should not be an issue for Republicans or Democrats,” Van Hollen said. “This is an issue for every American who cares about our constitution, who cares about individual liberty, who cares about due process and who cares about what makes America so different, which is adherence to all these things. This is an American issue.”

Connor O’Brien, Joe Gould, Robbie Gramer and Ali Bianco contributed to this report.