On Thursday, Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) spoke on the Senate floor asking their colleagues to vote for their resolution intended to give due process to those deported to prisons in foreign countries.
Van Hollen addressed his fellow Senators on behalf of deportees like Marylander Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom he visited in El Salvador last month.
“…he has been totally unable to contact anybody in the outside world before I met with him. And since, he’s in not only a total news blackout, but nobody can call him, not his lawyers, not his wife, not his mother, not his brother. That is a violation of international law. And that’s one of the hallmarks of this El Salvadoran gulag is people go into CECOT, and these other prisons, and you never hear from them again.”
The Senator concluded, “… all of us, regardless of party, should stand up to protect the Constitution, to protect due process and to make it clear that the President of the United States cannot ignore a nine to nothing Supreme Court order, which he is doing as we speak. Because if he can do it with one person or do it to two people, he can do it to anybody in the United States of America. And that is un-American.”
The resolution failed to pass by a 50-45 vote.
Today a Maryland judge will hear arguments over whether the administration can invoke the State Secrets Privilege to withhold information to bring Abrego Garcia home.
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