CNN senior political commentator Scott Jennings and author Batya Ungar-Sargon took a liberal panel to task Thursday night over the left’s defense of an illegal immigrant who was deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador.
In particular, Jennings blasted Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., for traveling to the Central American country to show support for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an alleged MS-13 gang member who was sent to the “Terrorism Confinement Center” (CECOT) in El Salvador.
The Trump administration has released documents that it says prove Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, a notorious transnational gang designated by Trump this year as a foreign terror group. It also produced domestic violence allegations filed in court by Abrego Garcia’s wife in 2021, and a 2022 report suspecting him of partaking in labor/human trafficking.
“I don’t understand why the American left falls in love with the worst people. You’ve got a gangbanging, human-trafficking, wife-beating, illegal alien; and a United States senator, in a ludicrous display of energy, is in El Salvador having Mai Tais and Yahtzee,” Jennings said on Thursday on “CNN NewsNight.”
A U.S. court granted Abrego Garcia temporary protected status in 2019, finding he faced a “clear probability of future persecution” if returned to his home country because “El Salvadoran authorities were and would be unable or unwilling to protect him.”
Government officials acknowledged in court his deportation in March was an administrative error. Both a federal district court and the U.S. Supreme Court have ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” his release and return to the U.S. for proper deportation proceedings.
Jennings admitted that it was an apparent mistake that Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador, but maintained that he would be deported again anyway.
“But even if you grant that, he has an adjudicated deportation order, and you have Democrat public officials falling all over themselves trying to get him back here without thinking through the next step, which is, he’s literally going to be deported somewhere else,” Jennings said during the panel.
Elsewhere, Ungar-Sargon declared, “He did have due process. Everything we know about him is documented because he did go through the court systems. He was stopped for trafficking. His wife did file these domestic violence charges against him.”
Democrats have rallied behind his case as a matter of defending the Constitution and affording due process.
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys maintain he was living in the U.S. legally and does not have any gang ties.
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