Congress

Van Hollen’s big moment: Defending a constituent and defying Trump

Published

1 year ago

April 18, 2025

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.

Congress

Senate’s summer pileup is threatening a quick recess escape

Published

5 hours ago

August 6, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Ideally, the Senate would be adjourning for a five-week break in less than 24 hours.

Instead, Republican senators are still navigating what Majority Leader John Thune described as a “train wreck” as they face a pileup of legislation, key nominations and public pressure from President Donald Trump and angry conservatives to show progress on a GOP election bill Trump views as his “No. 1 priority.”

They’re heading into Thursday — when the scent of jet fumes typically starts wafting through the halls of Congress — without a deal that would let them speed up votes on a government funding bill or long-stalled Russia sanctions bill.

Meanwhile, Todd Blanche’s attorney general nomination is still stuck in limbo after he came to the Capitol Wednesday for a roughly hourlong meeting with two key Republican holdouts.

That said, the general outlines of a deal that would allow senators to quickly get out of Washington and onto the campaign trail has started taking shape, even as senators and aides acknowledged they might have to stick around at least a little bit longer than they’d hoped.

“Don’t kill the vibe — it’s starting to pick up,” Thune said in an interview, while cautioning that “you’re not going to be smelling those [jet fumes] anytime real soon. … We’ve obviously got, like I said, a stack of stuff to do.”

One key issue Republicans haven’t yet settled is a new party-line spending bill that would pump billions of dollars into the Pentagon, to ailing farmers and into some elections-related spending that could take some of the Trump-fueled pressure off — even as several people with knowledge of the discussions said the votes aren’t there.

Thune hasn’t formally ruled out taking up a budget blueprint for the GOP bill, saying Wednesday it was “hard to say at this point” if he had the votes. But he indicated there was progress behind the scenes toward an exit strategy that would allow Republicans to start their recess with minimal internal friction.

“There’s not clarity, but it’s getting less cloudy if you put it that way,” Thune said.

Three people granted anonymity to discuss internal discussions said that endgame would not involve the time-consuming process of advancing a budget, but instead calling up a vote related to the SAVE America Act, the Trump-backed elections bill.

Republican leaders are hoping that holding a vote on the elections proposal, at the Senate’s usual 60-vote threshold for legislation, will let them hammer Democrats as the holdup while satisfying Republicans who have been frustrated over the lack of progress and have threatened to oppose leaving town.

“We’re looking at options there,” Thune said about possible SAVE America-related votes.

He added that it “remains to be seen” if that would be enough to placate Trump-allied rabble-rousers, “but we’ve had a number of conversations now about how we get the votes people feel are necessary.”

A key MAGA ally, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, posted a social media video Wednesday thanking Thune, saying that the conversation has moved in a “favorable direction” and that Republicans were discussing “what procedural vehicle to use in order to get this thing done.”

Thune has several other obstacles to clear besides the SAVE America fight.

Senators want an agreement that would let them extend government funding into mid-December, pass a sanctions bill targeting Russia in honor of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, confirm dozens of Trump nominees, including Blanche, and start work on a bipartisan college sports bill.

The highest drama surrounds Blanche, who met Wednesday with GOP Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Neither said afterward how they would vote on his nomination. With Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and every Democrat expected to oppose Blanche, and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) out for health reasons, he will need to win support from at least one of the two.

The legislative targets have issues, too: Republicans are grappling with intraparty wrangling over hemp language included in the stopgap bill, and Democrats are working through concerns in their ranks about the sanctions bill.

They also want to know if Republicans are going to force them to take a vote on cryptocurrency legislation that many Democrats currently oppose. They are eager to avoid taking that vote ahead of the recess as bipartisan talks happen behind the scenes — especially because a failed vote could potentially fuel tens of millions of dollars of campaign spending against Democratic opponents by industry allies.

Democrats are also looking for signals from Republicans about whether they will move forward with the party-line budget plan. But it was clear by Wednesday afternoon that major obstacles remained.

One GOP senator said Wednesday evening that “there won’t be the votes to do reconciliation and that will simplify things” for the rest of the schedule.

At a Senate GOP lunch meeting, Budget Chair Ron Johnson of Wisconsin presented his ideas for the budget blueprint. It would closely mirror a version that the House advanced last month, but it would also instruct a host of new committees to help draft the bill — expanding the range of issues Democrats could force vulnerable GOP incumbents to take tough votes on just months before the midterms.

Besides ongoing intra-GOP disputes about the amount of Pentagon funding to include and whether to offset the spending with cuts elsewhere, Thune is dealing with senators who aren’t convinced that they should force the issue just months before voters cast ballots.

Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who described himself as a “lean no” on the budget, said his views were being influenced by wanting to protect vulnerable colleagues.

“There’s only like five members of my conference that I care about. and they’re the ones who are running in at-risk states,” he said.

Asked if he would vote “no” to protect them, Tillis added, “I’m going to support my members who are up for election. They’re the most important priority right now.”

Congress

Trump urges GOP senators to back off hemp ban

Published

7 hours ago

August 5, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump and top White House officials are privately lobbying Republican senators to delay a ban on intoxicating hemp that’s set to kick in this fall.

At the Trump administration’s urging, the government funding patch the Senate is working to pass this week would push off the forthcoming ban of some cannabis products derived from hemp. But several Republican senators are demanding a vote to strip the delay out and let that prohibition kick in come November.

They’re hearing from the White House about it.

Trump called Sen. Ted Budd on Tuesday night, after the North Carolina Republican filed an amendment to ensure the ban kicks in as mandated on Nov. 12, according to a Senate aide granted anonymity to describe the private discussion. On the call, the president discussed creating a federal regulatory framework for hemp but did not ask Budd to withdraw his amendment, the individual added.

“I’ve been asked by lots of people to stand down on this amendment,” Budd told reporters Wednesday.

Budd noted that the Trump administration has had almost nine months to come up with a plan for implementing the ban.

“So why all of a sudden pop up for some seemingly innocent delay?” he asked, accusing the White House of instead preparing to “jam this on some must-pass” funding package at year’s end to further delay the prohibition.

A White House official granted anonymity to discuss the private debate said the Trump administration is seeking “a modest four-week delay” through the Dec. 11 expiration of the funding patch “to allow for productive conversations to continue.” Some synthetic cannabis products would be permanently banned in the meantime, the official added.

The administration lobbying has successfully swayed some Senate Republicans, such as Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who said in an interview that “the White House has committed to me that they’re committed to regulate the industry.”

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of hemp-rich Kentucky said the issue came up “in a big way” during Senate Republicans’ private lunch meeting Wednesday. Paul said he spoke in support of delaying the ban and said those arguing for a delay “aren’t very rational.”

“They’re wanting to hold up the funding for the government over one month,” he said. “It’s kind of insane.”

Grace Yarrow contributed to this report.

Congress

Holdouts meet with Blanche

Published

9 hours ago

August 5, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is in the Capitol meeting with holdout GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Bill Cassidy of Louisiania as he tries to lock down their support for his confirmation as permanent leader of the Justice Department.