U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen ’83, H ’14 (D-Md.) traveled to San Salvador on April 16. His goal was to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a constituent of his who was wrongly deported to El Salvador and imprisoned in the notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) — in order to check on his well-being and to speak with government officials about his release. 

On the first day of his trip, he met with Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa to request a visit with Abrego Garcia, which was denied. The next day, he was also denied access to see him in CECOT, but Van Hollen later that day was granted a meeting with Abrego Garcia, he said in a post on social media.

“I said my main goal of this trip (to El Salvador) was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance,” wrote Van Hollen.

"I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love," he added. "I look forward to providing a full update upon my return."

His visit underscored a broader Democratic effort to spotlight Abrego Garcia’s case as part of their challenge of the administration’s approach to immigration.

“This is an example of the much bigger challenge, no doubt about it,” Van Hollen said of the case of Abrego Garcia, who had been living in Maryland under an immigration judge’s order that granted him protections from deportation to El Salvador.

“Because my view is when you start picking on the most vulnerable people, and you push and push and push, and you get away with it, then you take the next bite.”

In a recent interview with Phoenix writer Daniel Perrin ’27, an economics major from Baltimore, Md., Van Hollen concluded by saying:

"The voice of the students of Swarthmore matters. Your voice matters, your actions matter, and you do have the power to bring about change. ... It’s more important than ever that people get fully engaged to protect our democracy, protect the rule of law, and protect our Constitution."

Chris Van Hollen was born in 1959 to parents serving in the U.S. Foreign Service in Pakistan. After a childhood going back and forth from Maryland and Pakistan, Turkey, India, and Sri Lanka, he attended Swarthmore and graduated with a B.A. in philosophy in 1983. After graduation, he earned a master of public policy from Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a J.D. from Georgetown Law Center, where he attended night school.

He was a staffer for Sen. Charles Mathias, for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and for Maryland Governor William Donald Schaeffer before being elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1990. He was elected to the Maryland Senate in 1994, to the U.S. Congress in 2002, and to the U.S. Senate (D-Md.) in 2016.