Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s trip yesterday to El Salvador to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia plainly wrongfooted Bukele, who first denied Van Hollen an opportunity to meet with the wrongfully deported man, then reversed himself and tried to sully their meeting with some hamfisted propaganda, directing an aide to place “glasses with cherries and salted rims” on the table “in an attempt to stage the photo.”Yes, that's real. The New York Times reports:
Mr. Bukele, in a social media post, even crowed that “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture,’” was “now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” But according to a person familiar with the situation, a Bukele aide placed the two glasses with cherries and salted rims on the table in front of Mr. Van Hollen and Mr. Abrego Garcia in the middle of their meeting in an attempt to stage the photo.Here's Bukele's tweet with the staged photos:
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the “death camps” & “torture”, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!πΉ pic.twitter.com/r6VWc6Fjtn
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) April 18, 2025
Those aren't very convincing margaritas.
Why would Bukele relent and allow Van Hollen to see Abrego Garcia? When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did a photo op in front of shirtless, tattooed prisoners last month at CECOT, the prison where Abrego Garcia is being held, The Bulwark's Jonathan Last wrote:
The use of prisoners for propaganda purposes is as old as war itself. But there are a few recent examples you may recall. ISIS made extensive use of videos and pictures of imprisonment and execution. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese alternated their approach. Sometimes they used American POWs as props to suggest that all was well in their camps and that prisoners were being treated properly. (They were not.) Other times, they used images of American prisoners as tools to spread fear. They would parade captured American soldiers before mobs and display them at press conferences.Bukele is sending conflicting messages, like the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. But he's always controlling the message.
The goal is always the same, though: To use prisoners’ bodies as weapons of political war and to do so against their will.
This is what evil, illiberal regimes do.
However, it's my sense that the current messaging is aimed at Americans who get 100% of their news from right-wing sources. That's a healthy portion of the country, but it's not all of us. To those people, Abrego Garcia is not only an unquestionably bad person and not only a gang member, he's one of the key members of the gang he's accused of joining.
Bondi is escalating the rhetoric against Abrego Garcia, who she calls "one of the top MS-13 members" and "a terrorist"
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 16, 2025 at 9:15 PM
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Before his abduction, Abrego Garcia worked full time as a sheet metal apprentice. How many "top" gang members are you aware of who need to work a forty-hour day job?
The Times reports that on Wednesday afternoon White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt
was joined in the briefing room by Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a Maryland resident who was brutally murdered in 2023 by an immigrant from El Salvador. The administration has pointed to Ms. Morin’s death as an example to justify its stance on immigration, though statistics show immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born citizens to commit crimes.The White House used your tax dollars to post a tweet with two photos, one showing Trump meeting Patty Morin and the other showing Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia.
We are not the same. pic.twitter.com/yTUoSXmCBa
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 18, 2025
You may object that while Rachel Morin was murdered by a Salvadoran, it was a Salvadoran other than Abrego Garcia. But in the MAGA/Fox News Extended Universe, all Salvadoran men are alike, all are murderers and MS-13 members and terrorists.
But when the Trumpers put this propaganda out, I think they forget that the immigrant horror stories that make up a disproportionate percentage of Fox News programming simply aren't front of mind for most Americans the way they are for Fox viewers.
And as for that word "terrorist": The Trumpers love to use it because it adds an extra layer of fear. They also use it because the fiction on which they're basing their detention drive includes the notion that Latin American governments are deliberately sending border crossers to America as an act of war. I hope you're sitting down for this: They're lying about that. The Washington Post reports:
The National Intelligence Council, drawing on the acumen of the United States’ 18 intelligence agencies, determined in a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United States by the prison gang Tren de Aragua, a judgment that contradicts President Donald Trump’s public statements, according to people familiar with the matter.And, of course, Kilmar Abrego Garcia isn't from Venezuela, or accused of being a member of Tren de Aragua -- he's from El Salvador and is accused of being a member of MS-13. But they know all those Latin Americans and Latin American gangs look alike to Fox viewers, the same way they know that their base can't distinguish Abrego Garcia and Rachel Morin's murderer.
The determination is the U.S. government’s most comprehensive assessment to date undercutting Trump’s rationale for deporting suspected gang members without due process under the Alien Enemies Act, [a] 1798 law....
The intelligence product found that although there are some low-level contacts between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua, or TdA, the gang does not operate at the direction of Venezuela’s leader.
So Fox viewers look at Abrego Garcia at that table with Senator Van Hollen and see a scary terrorist gang memnber. They have no idea that what the rest of us know about him includes the fact that the administration itself said he was abducted and deported due to an "administrative error." Members of the Trump regime would love to wipe out everyone's memory of that inconvenient truth the way they've banished knowldge of it in the minds of their own fans. So they pretend it's fake news:
The White House just posted this on X.
— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) April 18, 2025 at 11:26 AM
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Abrego Garcia isn't a perfect person. His wife did get an order of protection against him in 2021, though she now says the two have worked through their problems. But the larger point is that he should stay in the country or be expelled based on evidence and a formal process for assessing that evidence.
I think we need more Chris Van Hollens. Van Hollen and other Democrats should continue demanding to see the prison itself -- if Bukele is so proud of it, why won't he show it off? Polls show that Americans have sympathy even for immigrants living illegally in America as long as they're working and playing by the rules otherwise. Democrats in Congress should demand due process for the gay makeup artist and the abductee with the autism tattoo honoring his brother, and others.
And to the Democrats who fear this is a bad issue, I'd say that Democrats can do this and demand border security. Just make the processes fair and aboveboard. And it's not a "distraction" from the economy, as Gavin Newsom and others believe -- in their reactions to Trump's throw-everything-at-the-wall approach, Americans have demonstrated that they can respond to more than one issue at the same time.