Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland recounts his visit with Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Former prosecutor Elie Honig explains the three scenarios that could end this legal standoff. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Sen. Van Hollen during his meeting with Garcia at an undisclosed location in San Salvador. Photo by Sen. Van Hollen's Office via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened to Kilmar Abrego Garcia after his deportation?
On March 12th, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was picked up by ICE in Prince George's County, Maryland. In the days that followed, he was deported to the country where he was born, El Salvador, except this time he wound up in its infamous Seacott prison. At Seacott, they don't let any of the prisoners have access to the outside world.
Chapter 2: What legal actions were taken following Abrego Garcia's deportation?
On March 31st, the Trump administration said it had mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia, calling it an administrative error. On April 4th, a U.S. district judge told the Trump administration to have Abrego Garcia back in the United States by April 7th. On April 10th, the Supreme Court entered the chat and more or less agreed, saying the Trump administration needed to get Abrego Garcia back.
But it's April 23rd and he's still not back. On Today Explained, we're going to speak with the Maryland senator who sat down with Abrego Garcia in El Salvador last week and figure out how this legal standoff between the Trump administration and the courts might play out.
This week on A Touch More, we are live at Deep Blue's Business of Women's Sports Summit. Our special guest is Chelsea Clinton, who tells us what it means for her to be an investor in women's sports and what we can all learn from gutsy women. Plus, we break down the results of the WNBA draft and look ahead to the W's upcoming season.
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The Supreme Court has no army. So what happens if its orders are ignored?
We kept pretending that the court was a real court and that the law was really the law and that the Constitution was made of steel. And it turns out, like, none of that has been true for quite some time.
I'm Preet Bharara, and this week, Supreme Court expert Dahlia Lithwick joins me on my podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet, to discuss the myth that the legal system will save our democracy. The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts.
Sean Ramos for him today explained we spoke to Senator Chris Van Hollen on Tuesday afternoon. We started with why he wanted to go down to El Salvador to meet with Kilmar Abrego-Garcia.
Well, because I wanted to let him know, number one, that I was bringing greetings from his family who haven't heard from him since he was disappeared, right? He was locked away. No one was able to reach him, not his wife, not his mom, not his lawyers. In fact, until this moment, I'm the only one who's communicated with him before or since.
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Chapter 3: Why did Senator Chris Van Hollen visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador?
And so how did you end up getting to meet him?
Well, I asked, of course, the vice president. He said no. I said, if I come back next week, can I meet with him? No. Well, maybe I could get him on the phone. No. So the next day I decided not to give up. I drove towards Seacott prison. About three kilometers out, I was waved to the side of the road by soldiers, stopped me. You could see traffic continuing past me.
And so I said, why are you stopping me? They said, you can't go to see, you know, Abrego Garcia. And I said, do you know how he's doing? They said, no. And I said, why can't I go? They said, we have orders. So then we had some number of press events in El Salvador with local press and they did relent.
And I think that even Bukele recognized that it was a bad look for El Salvador to not allow anybody to meet or talk with this guy, to even know whether he was alive. And so as I was sort of getting ready to go to the airport on the way home, we got a call and I ended up meeting with him. What did he tell you? Well, first and foremost, he told me he missed his family.
And I told him how much his family missed him. And he said that thinking of them is what gave him strength every day. He said he had had a traumatic experience, of course. But that was his word, traumatic, both in being illegally abducted. He said he tried to make a phone call from, you know, the Baltimore, I think it was the Baltimore Detention Center. They wouldn't let him do it.
And then, of course, he landed in this really awful situation. uh, Seacott, uh, prison. So he was traumatized. He said he, he hurt, he felt he was in pain, said he hadn't, you know, committed any crimes. Uh, and, um, he asked me to, you know, pass his message of, of love back to his family.
And I informed him cause he'd been in a total news blackout that, you know, his case was now representative of, of the fight for constitutional rights and due process for everybody who lives in America and that a lot of people were working to get him out of prison in accordance with the Supreme Court 9-0 order to facilitate his return.
Did he say he was in danger? Did he say he was traumatized but felt relatively safe? What was the prison condition looking like?
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Chapter 4: What did Senator Van Hollen learn from his meeting with Abrego Garcia?
So the first place he went was Seacott. And he said he was not in fear for safety from the prisoners in his cell. He said, if I recall right, there are about 25 prisoners in his cell. He said he was scared and traumatized by other prisoners in other cells. And these cells are packed. I mean, they sometimes have more than 100 prisoners.
And he said that they would sort of call out to him and taunt him and, uh, in various ways. And that did make him feel very much at risk. He told me that he'd been moved to this other prison and detention center in Santa Ana. He told me he'd been there about eight days.
This is as the time I met with him, which were sort of better conditions, but still, and I want to stress this, still no ability to to communicate with anybody in the outside world and to learn anything about what's happening in the outside world. And that's why, you know, this is, that's a violation of international law to deny somebody the ability to talk to their lawyer or family.
So that's where he is sitting. Um, as we, he speak, he was clearly traumatized. Um, you know, when I, we talked about his family, he, he welled up, he teared, you can see a tear roll down his eyes. So he's, I mean, obviously it's a terrible, terrible situation and to be picked off the street and have the Trump administration admit it was wrongful in court.
When you guys met up, there was some photos released and it looks like you had like margarita glasses or something in front of you. Where did that come from? Where exactly was this meeting?
So interesting you raised that. I call this Margaritagate. They brought him to my hotel. At first, they wanted to stage the meeting by the pool, right, to create this impression to deceive people thinking that he was in some tropical paradise when he'd been in one of the worst prisons in El Salvador, notorious prison.
And if you look at the first photos taken, you'll see that, well, number one, I didn't let them set us by the pool. But you'll see that they, you'll see the original setting of the table just had water glasses and a cup of coffee. During our conversation, the government folks from Bukele said, instructed the waiters to set two taller-looking glasses on our table, making it look like margaritas.
I have no idea what's in them because neither of us touched them, but they had a little cherry on top, and they had either salt or sugar on the rim. And I said they totally screwed up the staging because— If you want to play Sherlock Holmes, you can see that there's no gap in the sugar or the salt where someone would have taken a sip. Although they tried, they put less liquid in his.
I think this is very instructive because it shows the lengths that Bukele and Trump will go to to deceive the American people about what's happening, right? Here's a guy illegally abducted, ends up in the worst prison, and they want to create this impression that, hey, this is, he's just in paradise. No problems.
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Chapter 5: What were the prison conditions described by Abrego Garcia?
She said that the Trump administration had presented, quote, no evidence, no evidence linking Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or to any terrorist activity, period. So put up or shut up in court. Again, I'm not vouching for the man. I'm standing up for his rights because all of our rights are at risk if we don't.
There's a lot of focus on this one individual, even though... Hundreds of undocumented migrants have been shipped off to El Salvador. California's governor, Gavin Newsom, called Garcia's case the, quote, distraction of the day. What's your response to that assessment?
My response is there's never a wrong time to stand up for the Constitution of the United States and due process. And I think— Americans of all political persuasions really don't like people who put their finger to the wind and try and decide what to do. I will say that when you're talking about fighting for fundamental rights, at the end of the day, I know the American people are with us.
You're not only saying we have to focus on constitutional rights. You're saying this situation with Abrego Garcia is a constitutional crisis. You say constitutional crisis. Gavin Newsom says distraction. How do we reconcile those two assessments of this very serious situation?
Well, this is a fundamental constitutional issue and it is a crisis because the Supreme Court has ruled nine to nothing that the Trump administration has to help facilitate his return to the United States. You know that you don't get many nine nothing decisions out of the Supreme Court. I also do just want to briefly quote what the Fourth Circuit said. This is a three judge panel.
And the chief judge who wrote it is a guy called Judge Wilkinson. He was appointed by Reagan. Here's what he says. It is difficult in some cases to get to the heart of the matter. But in this case. It's not hard at all.
The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. So this is not a distraction. This goes to the heart of protecting people's rights and what bullies do and what authoritarian leaders do and what Donald Trump is doing is beginning by picking on the most vulnerable
And refusing to bring his case in the courts and when the courts rule, ignoring them. So this is a very important moment to protect everyone's constitutional rights. It's not about one person. It's about all of us.
Senator Chris Van Hollen, Maryland, we're gonna run the scenarios of how this might end when we return on Today Explained.
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Chapter 6: What is the story behind the 'Margaritagate' photos?
And which role player is about to become a household name? With so many fascinating first-round matchups, Will the West be the bloodbath we anticipate? Will the East be as predictable as we think? Can the Celtics defend their title? Can Steph Curry, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard push the young teams at the top?
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This week on Profiteer Markets, we speak with Ryan Peterson, founder and CEO of Flexport, a leader in global supply chain management. We discuss how tariffs are actually impacting businesses, and we get Ryan's take on the likely outcomes of this ongoing trade war.
If they don't change anything and this 145% duty sticks on China, it'll take out like mass bankruptcies. We're talking like 80% of small business that buys from China will just die. And millions of employees will go, you know, we'll be unemployed. I mean, it's sort of why I'm like, they obviously have to back off the trade. Like, that can't be that they just do that.
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Chapter 7: How does Senator Van Hollen respond to allegations against Abrego Garcia?
Well, still in limbo. So this case has already made its way up and down the chain of the courts. It's gone from the district court all the way up to the Supreme Court. And now it's back down in the federal district court, which is what we call the trial courts. So the key word here, the key point of dispute is the F word, facilitation. Mm-hmm.
Now, what happened was the district court judge originally said to the US government, look, it's acknowledged by the administration that Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador in error. The Trump administration acknowledged that was a clerical error. He had an order in place that said he cannot be deported to El Salvador. Where do they deport him? The one place he can't be deported, El Salvador.
Now, the district court judge said to the executive branch, you have to facilitate and effectuate his return. Yeah. That goes up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court says, yes, unfacilitate, no, unaffectuate. Now, you're probably wondering, why are they drawing these lines? What do these words mean? Yeah.
The reason is the Supreme Court has drawn a line where they've said, it's not our role as the judiciary – to order the executive branch what to do when it comes to foreign affairs and foreign policy. Therefore, we're going to beseech you to facilitate, meaning help out, but we're not going to quite order you to effectuate, meaning make it happen, get him back here.
And now we're back down in the district court where there's just this never-ending fight about what does facilitate mean. The courts have made very clear They mean help out in a meaningful way. You have to take some affirmative act. But the administration is interpreting that term facilitate to mean just like don't get in the way. Make sure there's no obstacle.
So, you know, Sean, facilitation, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder.
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Chapter 8: Why is the Abrego Garcia case considered a constitutional crisis?
That being said, you've written for New York magazine about three scenarios that. could be how this plays out.
Yeah. Could you tell us about the three? Let me take one of them right off the table, and I'm interested what Senator Van Hollen has told you. There is not a realistic scenario where Kilmar Abrego Garcia comes back to the United States, returns to his family in Maryland, and resumes his former life. I just...
Don't think that's possible politically, A, because the administration is so dug in, and B, probably legally, because the fact is he's not at this moment a green card holder, a legal permanent resident. He does not have a visa. He's not a citizen. So it's pretty easy to deport someone who doesn't have legal status here.
Taking that off the table, the first situation is where we are right now, what I call passive-aggressive resistance, where there continues to be this fight over what the definition of facilitate is, and it goes back up and down the chain. And ultimately, the administration goes, look, you may not like it, but you said facilitate.
What we're doing counts as facilitation, and we weren't able to get him back. Sorry. The courts have made clear they don't like that, but if they accept that, then we're going to end up in this sort of purgatory, and Kilmer Abrego Garcia is going to... remain in El Salvador. Scenario two is if the courts get a little tougher and a little more serious and a little more specific.
What if one of the courts, district court on up, it could go back up to the Supreme Court, says, okay, listen, you're playing games here with Facilitate. We need to be more specific. You are to request his return. You are to cut off funding for the prison that we're renting. You are to bring him back.
Then either the administration complies, which will bring us to scenario three, or the administration defies. And if the administration defies a direct order – look, I'm the last person to use constitutional crisis. I think it's a vastly overused term. But I think we're there at that point because my definition of constitutional crisis is when we don't have a playbook for what comes next.
OK.
And that brings us to our third scenario. If he comes back here, if the administration decides we're going to avoid that kind of showdown, we're going to bring him back, they're going to immediately look to begin and perhaps quickly conclude the process of deporting him anywhere other than El Salvador.
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