Hello and welcome to the GZero World Podcast.

This is where you can find extended versions of my interviews on public television.

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today I am coming to you from inside the U.S. Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C.,

where I just sat down with Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen.

If his name sounds familiar, that's not by chance. He's one of the rare Democrats who has managed to break through the noise in the chaotic first 100 days of the Trump administration.

Back in April, Van Hollen took a highly publicized trip to El Salvador to visit Kilmar Abrago Garcia, a Maryland father of three,

who was deported to the country's infamous

Seacot mega prison. The Trump administration claimed Abrago Garcia had ties to the MS-13 gang,

but later called his deportation to El Salvador an administrative error. Critics dismissed

Senator Van Hollins' visit as a political stunt,

but polling is now on the Senator's side. An ABC News poll from late April show that nearly twice,

as many Americans, support bringing Garcia back to the U.S., compared to keeping him imprisoned abroad.

But it's not just the El Salvador trip that put Van Hollen on my radar. The senator

is carving out a space alongside the likes of Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Corey Booker as a vocal

critic of a Trump administration at the height of its powers. And perhaps more notably,

Van Hollen is a rising party leader at a time when the rudderless Democrats sorely need one.

He also sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

I'll ask him about that and a lot more in today's show.

So let's get to it. Senator Chris Van Holland. Thanks so much for joining.

Great to be with you, Ian.

Thank you. So hard to break through the media cycle in this

environment. You managed to do it by going down to El Salvador, visiting a man that was illegally

...