Brutal Juxtaposition: Mother of Woman Slain by Illegal Immigrant Slams Van Hollen Trip to El Salvador
Sen. Chris Van Hollen had already tried, and failed, to secure a meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia when the White House decided to make the controversy personal in searing detail.
The Maryland Democrat had vowed to the wife of Abrego Garcia, the migrant deported from Maryland into a Salvadoran prison without trial, “to do everything possible to bring him home.” His case is the latest lightning rod in the ongoing battle over the Trump administration’s vow to deport the more than 20 million migrants in the United States illegally.
Abrego Garcia is being held in a now notorious Salvadoran prison despite a court order to halt his deportation. The Supreme Court called on the administration to facilitate his return. President Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said last week that they will not comply.
“I may be the first United States senator to visit El Salvador on this issue,” Van Hollen told a scrum of reporters surrounding him, “but there will be more, and there will be more members of Congress coming.”
But if there are more, the Trump administration will respond to all of them the same: They will accuse Democrats of being “incapable of having any shred of common central empathy for their own constituents.” This was the message of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt Wednesday as she introduced Patty Morin, mother of Rachel Morin, a Maryland woman murdered by an illegal immigrant.
Morin begged the press to remember her daughter, too. Rachel Morin was also taken from her home.
She was murdered two years ago by an illegal immigrant who stalked the mother on a hiking trail north of Baltimore, beat her head against rocks, and raped her inside a tunnel. Her killer, Victor Martinez-Hernandez, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, was found guilty Monday.
“The skull was shattered the way you would crush an eggshell,” Morin said. The vicious assault was so brutal, she said of her deceased daughter, that the court had sealed police images of the crime at her request. “I never want my granddaughters to see these images,” she explained.
But Morin said she could not fathom why her senator had traveled to Central America.
Van Hollen had not “even acknowledge, or barely acknowledge, my daughter and the brutal death that she endured, leaving her five children without a mother…so that he can use my taxpayer money to fly to El Salvador to bring back someone that’s not even an American citizen,” she said.
“Why does that person have more rights than I do, or my daughter, or my grandchildren?” she asked of Abrego Garcia, the illegal immigrant Van Hollen hoped to bring home.
“I don’t understand this,” she concluded.
This was the brutal juxtaposition the administration orchestrated. Democrats and the media, alleged Leavitt, were all too eager to focus on sympathetic cases that cut against administration efforts. Vice President J.D. Vance had warned on the campaign trail that opponents would play on emotion to argue that deportation efforts were tantamount to “fascism come to America.”
Hence the impromptu press conference with an advertised but unnamed “special guest” who brought the press corps scurrying back to the White House Wednesday. The goal was to bring into focus the often-unseen victims of crimes.
The harrowing account sharpened what White House officials portray as the hypocrisy of Democrats. It does not, however, cut through the legal controversy that Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to address.
The White House cites the findings of two different judges to allege that Abrego Garcia is a member of the violent MS-13 gang. On Wednesday, Leavitt produced a May 2021 restraining order taken out by his wife against him. The administration insists they were following the law and protecting Americans. Van Hollen alleges the exact opposite. Abrego Garcia was not an MS-13 gang member, the senator insisted. He was “a family man” who was wrongfully “abducted” off the street.
“I’m asking President Bukele, under his authority as president of El Salvador, to do the right thing and allow Mr. Abrego Garcia to walk out of a prison – a man who’s charged with no crime, convicted of no crime and who was illegally abducted from the United States,” Van Hollen said earlier in the day.
The senator accused the White House of “lying.” The Trump administration returned the favor. The battle over deportations and illegal immigration will be ongoing, with examples of shattered families on both sides caught in the middle of a debate Washington has failed to settle for decades.
For her part, the grieving mother brought to the briefing room begged that the press remember her daughter and other American victims like her.
“Please tell the truth,” she told reporters as she stepped away from the podium. “Tell how violent it really is. This is about protecting our children. It’s more than just politics or votes or anything, it’s about national security. Protecting Americans, protecting our children.”