White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller sharply criticized Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen following the senator’s controversial trip to El Salvador, where he met with deported MS-13 gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Miller accused Van Hollen of prioritizing an accused criminal over American victims, stating the senator traveled not to combat crime or the fentanyl crisis in his home state, nor to support families affected by illegal immigration, but to visit Garcia—an alleged MS-13 member and domestic abuser currently held in El Salvador’s high-security CECOT prison.
Photos of the visit, shared by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, were used to ridicule Van Hollen’s claims that deported migrants face “torture” and detention in “death camps.” He wrote: “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ and ‘torture,’ is now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!”
President Trump also wrote on Truth Social, “Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone. GRANDSTANDER!!!” Not content with his controversial visit making headlines, Senator Van Hollen doubled down by posting a glowing update about his meeting with the deported criminal—going so far as to call Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wife to deliver a “message of love” on his behalf.
Miller tore into Van Hollen’s disgraceful priorities. “I’m almost at a loss for words for how outrageous it is. Here’s an individual—the man who has been deported to his home country of El Salvador—who has been repeatedly documented by multiple federal and state authorities to be a member of MS-13, one of the most violent and ruthless criminal organizations on planet Earth, which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.
Continuing, Miller said, “An individual who has been involved in human smuggling and human trafficking. An individual who is a documented woman beater—somebody who has viciously attacked a woman in ways that shock the human conscience. That is who the Democrat Party is going to provide aid, solace, and comfort to—not to Senator Van Hollen’s own constituents, like the Morin family. Rachel Morin was viciously beaten, brutally raped, and murdered—and her mother never even got a phone call from Senator Van Hollen. Or Kayla Hamilton, a young girl who was attacked in a public restaurant, raped in the bathroom, and beaten to death—murdered by an illegal alien that Joe Biden set free into the country.
“None of those people elicit human sympathy from Senator Van Hollen. How broken is that man’s heart? How broken is his conscience, that he doesn’t have even an ounce of empathy, or time, or concern to share with those families?” Miller continued. “Or how many of his citizen constituents have been killed by the fentanyl that Joe Biden allowed into this country—by the cartels that made a fortune off of human trafficking and smuggling into this country?” He added: “Or the children in his state that cannot even get a good education or good health care because of the mass migration that has occurred into his state? None of that concerns him in the least. His heart is reserved for an illegal alien who’s a member of a foreign terrorist organization. I’m beyond appalled.”