If there's a more ridiculous member of the Senate than Maryland's leftist Chris Van Hollen, his name is yet to be known.

Last week, Van Hollen flew down to El Salvador in a bid to bring repatriated Salvadoran MS-13 member Kilmar Abrego Garcia "home" to Maryland. A few days ago, he waxed about the illegal immigrant's status as a devoted father, and his contributions to the U.S. as a union sheet metal worker, leaving off the part about how Abrego Garcia deprived some American of a "good-paying job" on that alone.

Then the boom was lowered, by both President Trump and President Nayyib Bukele of El Salvador, almost working as a tag team to do a number on the leftist fool.

Trump released police reports and other evidence showing that Abrego Garcia was an MS-13 member with quite a history of encounters with the cops. Trump held up photos of his MS-13-tattooed hands, for one, and various wife-beating reports indicating that he wasn't exactly a good father or husband appeared. The Trump team released reports of deportation judges, rejecting his claims for asylum. Another release showed that the Tennessee state cops stopped him on a highway as a suspected human trafficker, traveling with around with eight people who didn't have luggage bags in his vehicle. The cops detained him and asked the Biden DoJ what to do. The answer from those quarters was to let him go. And voilà, no criminal record.

But nobody's idea of a sweet little daisy, either. Most people want that guy gone. Only crazy leftists want him back.

Meanwhile, down in San Salvador, President Bukele, seeing Van Hollen stand in front of the prison and carp about not being let in, decided to pull a little stunt on him:

He made sure lots of pictures were taken, as President Trump's DoJ was drip-drip-dripping out Abrego's police records.

Now Van Hollen's trying to salvage what little dignity he has left. He's sputtering in rage that the margaritas were fake and he didn't ask for them nor did he and Abrego Garcia drink them.

Of course they weren't. That was why it was fun. He got played for a fool, which is why they were delivered for the pictures and that mocking tweet from the president. Latin American leaders have long loathed leftist losers from the states, all full of piety and sanctimony, coming down to their countries and proclaiming them death squad regimes, human rights violators, torturers, and all that. They've seen this movie before, pioneered by bloated, debauched legislators such as Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd, Jim McGovern, Greg Meeks, most of whom have (D-Mass.) after their name. I've been to Latin America, and know that the fake charges from them make these leaders puke. All this, while real death squad regimes, such as Marxist Venezuela, draw no condemnation whatsoever from them.

The troll accomplished, Van Hollen is still desperately trying to justify himself.

Here's his latest from the Sunday talks:

“I am not defending the man. I'm defending the rights of this man to due process,” Van Hollen told ABC News' “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl on Sunday. “And the Trump administration has admitted in court that he was wrongfully detained and wrongfully deported. My mission and my purpose is to make sure that we uphold the rule of law, because if we take it away from him, we do jeopardize it for everybody else.”

The guy had more due process than just about anyone out there, filing appeal after appeal after appeal of his final deportation order. Now Van Hollen is trying to claim that a judicial stay of deportation issued at the last minute amounted to legal status in the states that surpassed all the final deportation orders, overruling all of those judges who found him a deportable alien.

All it means is they deported him to the wrong country, except that the wrong country is the country of his actual citizenship. And in any case, the point is moot, the gang Abrego Garcia was supposedly being protected from in El Salvador, Barrio 18, is long gone, while the same gang is very much alive and well and operating in the states. Sending Abrego Garcia back to his native El Salvador was actually doing him a favor, protecting him from the revenge attacks to whatever it was he did to upset Barrio 18 in the states.

But Van Hollen persists, shifting his argument from 'loving father' and 'good union man' to only caring about due process. This is ridiculous. Abrego Garcia had his day in court and was ordered back to his native country. But Van Hollen wants the foreign national with a skeevy background back here, and he's willing to twist in the wind to shift his argument to anything he thinks he can use to bring him back.

He's trying to save face. He's now a figure of fun. House leaders have rejected other Democrats' request to have Congress pay for their junkets, too, so he's thrashing, trying to do anything he can to avoid being a laughingstock. It's a little late for that, doofus.

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