Kudos to Maryland’s senior Senator Chris Van Hollen for persisting in meeting in person with Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia last week in El Salvador.

Garcia was mistakenly deported and the Trump Administration has said they have no authority to bring him back. The senator, rightly, highlighted the due-process fundamentals of U.S. law and the Constitution, which applies not just to citizens, but green card holders and foreign individuals with court-protected status.

There was a moral and legal imperative to act now, and expeditiously. The utterly lawless and defamatory attitude of a bullying president and his Amen Chorus of shameless sycophants in the Oval Office, defying district court, appeals court and Supreme Court orders, has frightening implications for U.S. citizens, “home-born” or naturalized, given the threats by Trump to expel even them to a foreign prison.

Sen. Van Hollen showed the same concern for another Maryland citizen and his family: our only child, Marine 1st. Lt. Hugh Conor McDowell, who was killed at age 24 in a fully preventable training fiasco at Camp Pendleton on May 19, 2019.

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Chris called us right away, and we met with him and Sen. Ben Cardin at their offices after we brought Conor back on an Angel Flight to BWI a week later. The senators then arranged for us and Conor’s fiancee, Kathleen Bourque, to meet with the vice-chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, then-Rep. Anthony Brown, now Maryland’s attorney general. This led to major acts of Congress and hundreds of millions of dollars added annually for training reforms, and the Pentagon being ordered to report all training deaths to the House and Senate.

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In short, Chris was there for us along every single step of the way over the past painful years, and we have reduced the shockingly high death toll of young women and men in training.

Rep. Andy Harris has of course nastily criticized Van Hollen for his El Salvador trip, but the senator was fulfilling his elected duty in demanding the return of a Maryland resident to his wife and children.

Van Hollen is a workhorse. One-bill-in-eight-terms-in-Congress Harris is a show horse.

In Maryland, we need workhorses in Congress, not show horses.

Michael H.C. McDowell and Susan M. Flanigan, Chestertown