Democrats could have freed ‘Maryland man’ Abrego Garcia. They chose politics instead.

Maryland Democrat Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s failed trip to El Salvador to free Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia — an illegal immigrant and MS-13 gang affiliate — from a maximum-security prison reveals a stupid irony. Democrats might have succeeded in transferring him to a neighboring country if they had taken a smarter, subtler approach. Instead, they chose politics. Because this was never actually about Abrego Garcia. It was about attacking President Donald Trump.

You wouldn’t know it from the media coverage, but Abrego Garcia was deported legally — under a long-standing court order. Virtually no corporate outlet will admit this, because it undermines the media narrative. On his third appeal, Abrego Garcia convinced a judge that El Salvador wasn’t safe for him. So the court issued a withholding of removal — not asylum, but a directive that he be deported to a country other than El Salvador. Someone in the federal government screwed up and missed this order, and he ended up imprisoned in his home country.

Thanks to Van Hollen’s choice to make a spectacle instead of a phone call, the outcome is assured.

There was a simple, time-tested way to resolve this. As a U.S. senator, Van Hollen is one of the most powerful people on the planet — when he wants to be. He didn’t need a protest or a viral TikTok video. He needed to pick up the phone.

He could have called his former Senate colleague, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He could have explained that Abrego Garcia — a man married to a U.S. citizen, found by both an immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals to be affiliated with MS-13 but not personally tied to any violent acts — was wrongly sent to a Salvadoran prison, despite a court order forbidding it.

Van Hollen could have made the case for sending him to a third country — Guatemala, Belize, Costa Rica, anywhere else. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked. Maybe the Trump administration wanted to send a clear message to illegal alien gangbangers: Self-deport or end up in your home country’s prisons, not ours.

But now, thanks to Van Hollen’s choice to make a spectacle instead of a phone call, the outcome is assured.

Making a real difference was never the goal. The goal was to embarrass the Trump administration while scoring points with the Democratic base. That’s why Van Hollen was dialing the State Department from El Salvador instead of calling from his office in Washington — and why no one picked up. It was political theater aimed at Democrat die-hards, especially the party’s most loyal demographic: white, college-educated women.

You can tell by the subtitles in his videos. They weren’t in Spanish. They were in English.

But the stunt blew up in his face. While Van Hollen was playing activist abroad, the Trump White House was hosting one of his actual constituents: Maryland resident Patty Morin. Her daughter — a mother of five — was raped, beaten, and strangled to death by an illegal immigrant on a nearby woodland trail.

Meanwhile, ICE continued arresting criminal aliens in Maryland. Back home, serious work was still getting done.

Now the fight is out in the open. What could have been a quiet exercise in inter-partisan diplomacy has been dragged into a partisan war over presidential power — thanks in part to Maryland Judge Paula Xinis’ judicial jihad against the Trump White House, which the Supreme Court had to rein in.

What was once a manageable diplomatic issue has become a high-stakes battle over Article II authority and the executive branch’s right to enforce immigration law and conduct foreign policy. And while the legal turf war rages on, Abrego Garcia remains behind bars in El Salvador.

As one CNN panelist snapped when reminded that their new folk hero’s own wife accused him in 2021 of being a serial abuser: “We can’t make it about Kilmar!”

Blaze News: The illegal aliens picked up by ICE in Maryland while Van Hollen was in El Salvador

Sign up for Bedford’s newsletter
Sign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford’s newsletter.