Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen returns April 18 from two days in El Salvador, where he traveled to check on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongly deported from the United States by the Trump administration.

The senior senator from Maryland went to El Salvador on April 16 after Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said during a visit to the White House that he would not release Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran who entered the U.S. illegally but was given legal status to stay in the country due to fear of persecution.

The White House has acknowledged that they mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia, but still allege that he was an MS-13 gang leader who should be in El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center. Abrego Garcia denies being a member of the gang and he has no criminal convictions. During remarks in the Oval Office Friday, President Donald Trump called Van Hollen “a fake.”

Van Hollen’s visit has brought new attention to Abrego Garcia’s case, which has become a flashpoint in the administration’s immigration policies – as a human rights crisis on the left, and as a justified attempt to deliver on campaign promises for the right.

Here’s what to know about the Maryland senator.

Three decades in politics

Van Hollen, 66, got his start in politics as a staffer for former Maryland U.S. Sen. Charles Mathias in the 1980s, going on to staff the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, later, Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaefer.

Van Hollen was first elected to the Maryland General Assembly in 1991, where he served in the state House and Senate for more than a decade. He was elected to the U.S. House in 2002, unseating a moderate Republican who had held Maryland’s 8th District, representing portions of the Washington, D.C. suburbs.

He served in the House for 14 years before running for and winning an open U.S. Senate seat left by retiring Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski in 2016.

A childhood spent abroad

Van Hollen – now a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – grew up outside the United States.

His mother was a State Department and CIA analyst, and his father was a foreign service agent who served as U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka under former President Richard Nixon.

Van Hollen was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and lived in the Washington area, Turkey, India and Sri Lanka during his childhood.

“In Sri Lanka, I went to a village and went into a hut, and there was a picture of John F. Kennedy on the wall—it was somebody whose life had been touched by the Peace Corps,” Van Hollen told Washingtonian magazine in 2008. “That became one of my passions—how the U.S. can interact with the rest of the world and be a leader.”

Trials and victories as campaign chief

Each political party has campaign arms in the House and Senate that spearhead efforts to win the chamber for their side, raising money for candidates and advising them on political strategy.

Van Hollen has been the leader of both Democratic outfits – the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the House and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in the Senate.

Van Hollen led the DCCC in the 2008 and 2010 campaign cycles, when Democrats expanded their majority and then lost dozens of seats – and the chamber – in the wake of the Great Recession.

He took another crack at campaign leadership years later as the DSCC chairman during the 2018 campaign cycle, when Senate Democrats faced a challenging map of 26 seats up for reelection compared to only nine for Senate Republicans. The Senate GOP expanded their majority that year, flipping seats in four states.

Outspoken on Gaza

As the Democratic Party splintered over the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza amid the 2024 presidential election, Van Hollen emerged as one of the party’s more outspoken critics of Israel and of President Joe Biden‘s approach to the conflict, while pressing for a ceasefire and for Hamas to release Israeli hostages.

In a speech on the Senate floor, he said children dying of starvation in Gaza was a “textbook war crime,” and called Biden’s “inaction” on Gaza “shameful.“

In an opinion piece published in The Washington Post last December, he argued Biden had failed to use American power to rein in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and protect the security of both Palestinians and Israelis, and argued it was “critical” that Biden use the remaining days of his presidency to reverse course.

“For too long, President Biden has been unwilling to uphold our values and enforce our interests in the Middle East,” Van Hollen wrote.