On April 18, after his widely reported trip to El Salvador to visit the wrongly-imprisoned migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Sen. Chris Van Hollen got what I call the FOX Question: Irrelevant, distractive, intended to inflame rather than inform.
A reporter asked Van Hollen about Rachel Morin, the 37-year-old woman who was murdered in Harford County by a Salvadoran migrant in 2023. The question: How does Van Hollen answer the charge, leveled by the victim’s mother at a White House briefing, that he cared more about Kilmar Abrego Garcia than Rachel Morin, a mother of five children, who was killed by a violent man in the U.S. without permission?
Van Hollen could have done what President Donald Trump often does — dismiss the question and chastise the reporter for asking it.
Instead, the Maryland senator remained poised; he patiently answered in the usual humane, thoughtful and principled manner that makes him one of the class acts in American politics. He acknowledged Morin’s death while turning attention back to the main issue — Abrego Garcia’s detention without due process and the Trump administration’s defiance of a Supreme Court directive to bring him back to Maryland.
“My heart breaks for what happened to [the Morin family],” Van Hollen said. “That should not happen to any family in America, and I am very glad that a court of law convicted her killer and is going to punish her killer. The reason we have courts of law is to punish the guilty, but also to make sure that those who have not committed crimes are not found guilty and arbitrarily detained. In other words, everybody has due process.
“So the effort by the Trump Administration to try to conflate these two issues goes to their effort to change the subject. But again, to the Morin family … I cannot imagine losing a child and the heartbreak that causes. My heart breaks for everybody in Maryland or America who lost a loved one to violence, regardless of the perpetrator.”
Van Hollen’s answer started with his detection of the common right-wing trick of conflation. He then broke it apart.
It’s hard to imagine anyone, politician or not, giving a better answer to the twisted suggestion that concern for the unlawful detention of Kilmar Abrego Garcia translates to callous disregard for the late Rachel Morin.
Van Hollen, a Democrat in the middle of his second term, is extravagantly skilled in giving thoughtful answers to a myriad of topics, without sounding preachy or slick. He’s been that way for as long as I’ve known him, watched him and had occasion to interview him.
The flood of executive orders from the Oval Office since January has made Van Hollen one of the leading voices of the steady (and must be exhausting) resistance to Trump’s constitutionally dubious actions.
While the Abrego Garcia meeting put the senator in the international spotlight, he has, on a daily basis, made press comments, floor speeches, rally speeches, TV appearances or social media videos to warn Americans about the damage inflicted on the federal government — and Van Hollen’s constituent federal employees — by Trump and by Elon Musk.
People who complain that congressional Democrats have been slow to highlight abuses of presidential power have not been following Maryland’s senior senator. He’s been on this since January, when Trump started flashing his Sharpie and signing executive orders. In fact, it’s been difficult to keep up with Van Hollen.
On May 8, he went hard after Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, for being evasive about Abrego Garcia and her agency’s compliance with the Supreme Court.
On Monday, at the Center for American Progress, he accused the Salvadoran government of Nayib Bukele — the “world’s coolest dictator” — of violating Abrego Garcia’s constitutional rights by keeping him in custody. He also alleged that Bukele’s regime has been helping the Trump administration spread misinformation about Abrego Garcia.
But Van Hollen has had a lot more to say about . . . almost everything. Either independently, or joined by Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, his Maryland Democratic colleague — more on her in a future column — Van Hollen has:
- Slammed the Trump administration for withholding congressionally approved funds for public safety, disaster relief, infrastructure improvements, drug treatment, suicide prevention, Head Start, clean energy jobs, small businesses, higher education, food inspections and care of veterans.
- Decried the end of foreign aid through the U.S. Agency for International Development and the stranding of USAID workers overseas.
- Blasted Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the nation’s health secretary, chronicling his long history of crackpot conspiracy theories about vaccines, as well as his pledge to stop federal funding for lifesaving research at the Maryland-based National Institutes of Health. (On Saturday, at a rally of her own, Alsobrooks called for Kennedy’s resignation.)
- Hit constantly at Musk’s millions for Trump’s re-election campaign as the obscene purchase of access to the Oval Office, the federal government and the tax and Social Security records of millions of Americans.
- Introduced a resolution calling for the Senate to reaffirm its condemnation of Russia for war crimes in Ukraine.
- As a member of the U.S. Naval Academy Board of Visitors, Van Hollen got the academy superintendent to hold a briefing next month on the nearly 400 books purged from the Nimitz Library on Trump administration orders.
- Criticized the administration’s plan to cut funds for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt: “NASA science missions are critical to discovering the secrets of the universe and the planet we live on and have a direct bearing on our leadership in technological innovation and our national security. To gut NASA Goddard is not just shortsighted, it’s dangerous.”
That was just a random sampling of Van Hollen’s daily warnings about the Trump administration. To be sure, with Democrats in the minority, all he has are words. Words and truth. But words and truth beat cowardly silence. Without words and truth, democracy dies.
What he “defends” is some odd version of socialism, but he calls it democracy. And what an interesting set of accomplishments: slammed, decried, blasted, hit constantly, criticized. And introduced a resolution about a war that only started when Russia saw the weakness of a democratic led U.S. Here’s what van holland actually did: he defended Hamas and blasted our ally, Israel. Yes, the one that Hamas attacked. And he spent our tax money on a self serving photo op to show support for a human trafficking, wife beating illegal gang member. Wow, that is some record