Chris Van Hollen is an impressive guy and a very smart one.
What he did by going to that El Salvador prison and insisting on seeing Kilmar, was a highly effective way to protect Kilmar, to keep him alive. And on April 21, four congresspeople went to El Salvador to amplify Van Hollen’s efforts.
Now, in 2025, with our high-profile social media and news media, these humane moves by politicians have been broadcast to the world, greatly expanding the protective intentions of these visits. They say,”These are our people. You are criminally detaining them and the world knows it. We will be bringing them home. Keep them safe until we do.”
Slightly more than eighty years ago, what our good congresspeople are doing here was done by a group of unheralded Danes who defied the Nazi occupation of Denmark to save their vulnerable countrymen, Danish Jews.
After the Danes helped 99 percent of Danish Jews escape a Gestapo round-up and interrment in Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, ordinary Danish citizens did not forget the 470 people who had been captured by the Gestapo.
In 1944, the year after that mass rescue, Danish grassroots helpers used the postal service to mail packages of food and other necessities to Danes at Theresienstadt. Later that year, the Swedish Red Cross took over responsibility for getting sustenance into the concentration camp.
Throughout the rest of the war, Danish and Swedish officials insisted on receiving frequent reports about the condition of the imprisoned people. This aggressive attention was one major reason why perhaps only one of the Danish prisoners was transferred to a Nazi extermination camp. All but fifty elderly people survived Theresienstadt.
A month before the war was officially over, Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte and the Swedish Red Cross drove buses to Theresienstadt, pulled thousands of inmates, including some four-hundred and twenty Danish Jews, out of the camp and took them to Sweden.
In essence, this is what Senator Van Hollen and Democratic members of the U.S. Congress have done and plan to continue doing: make sure the CECOT prisoners are all right and draw the attention of the world to the crimes Trump’s goon squad, clearly modeled after the Gestapo, is inflicting on the most vulnerable of us.