Abrego Garcia returned to U.S. from El Salvador to face charges

WASHINGTON – Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man at the center of a political and legal maelstrom after he was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, was flown back to the United States on Friday to face charges of having transported migrants living in the country illegally.

The stunning move by the Trump administration, after months of fighting any effort to return him, could end the most high-profile court battle over President Donald Trump’s authority to rapidly seize and deport immigrants.

The decision to pull Abrego Garcia out of El Salvador and instead put him on trial in an American courtroom could provide an off-ramp for the Trump administration, which had bitterly opposed court orders requiring the government to take steps to return him after his wrongful removal in March.

The 10-page indictment – filed in U.S. District Court in Nashville, Tennessee, in May and unsealed Friday – might also be an effort to save face: Bringing Abrego Garcia back to face criminal charges allows the White House to avoid a legal confrontation, while pressing claims he is a criminal who poses a threat to American citizens.

“Abrego Garcia has landed in the United States to face justice,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said at a news conference in Washington. “He was a smuggler of humans and children and women.

“This is what American justice looks like.”

Two people familiar with the investigation said it made a significant leap forward when an imprisoned man recently came forward offering information about Abrego Garcia, but there was concern and disagreement among prosecutors about how to proceed. In recent weeks, a supervisor in the federal prosecutor’s office in Nashville resigned over how the case was handled, these people said.

Bondi went on to level accusations against Abrego Garcia that were not included in the indictment, claiming that co-conspirators told investigators he had helped smuggle “minor children” and gang members during dozens of trips around the country. She linked him to more serious crimes, including murders and the abuse of women – even though he has only been charged in connection with smuggling.

She also claimed, without providing evidence, that his seemingly law-abiding life in Maryland as a contractor, father and husband was a cover for a criminal activities spanning nine years. Bondi, who spearheaded the administration’s public relations campaign to discredit him during the court battle, predicted that he would be convicted and returned to El Salvador for imprisonment.

Bondi declined to say when the Tennessee investigation into Abrego Garcia was opened. His indictment was filed May 21 and unsealed Friday after he arrived in the United States.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said he believed the indictment was likely to render moot the lawsuit brought by Abrego Garcia’s family to force his release from Salvadoran custody.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said they welcomed their day in court and pointed out that the government’s decision to return him to the United States undercut its long-standing efforts to keep him in El Salvador.

“Today’s action proves what we’ve known all along – that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so,” said Andrew Rossman, a lawyer for Abrego Garcia. “It’s now up to our judicial system to see that Mr. Abrego Garcia receives the due process that the Constitution guarantees to all persons.”

Ama Frimpong, legal director for CASA, an immigrant rights group based in Maryland, described the mixed feelings of Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura. She “is of course very happy that her husband is back on U.S. soil, at least as far as we know,” Frimpong said, “but of course, under very egregious and horrendous circumstances.”

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who had previously said he would not return Abrego Garcia, said on social media Friday, “We work with the Trump administration, and if they request the return of a gang member to face charges, of course we wouldn’t refuse.”

Even though the Trump administration has repeatedly accused Abrego Garcia of belonging to MS-13 – which has been designated as a terrorist organization – a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in April that the defendant had been deprived of his rights by being wrongly deported.

“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13,” the panel wrote. “Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.”

Since the start of the case, administration officials have sought to depict Abrego Garcia, a metal worker who has lived illegally in the United States without criminal charges for years, as a member of MS-13. The charges filed against him Friday accused him of belonging to the gang and taking part in a conspiracy to “transport thousands of undocumented aliens” across the United States.

In court papers seeking his pretrial detention, prosecutors said Abrego Garcia had been part of a trafficking conspiracy and had played “a significant role” in smuggling immigrants, including unaccompanied minors.

If convicted, Abrego Garcia could face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for each person he transported, the papers said, a penalty that would go “well beyond the remainder of the defendant’s life.”

Abrego Garcia has been in Salvadoran custody since March 15, when he was flown, along with scores of other migrants, into the hands of jailers at the so-called Terrorism Confinement Center, a notorious prison known as CECOT. He was later moved to another facility in El Salvador.

For nearly three months, his lawyers have been trying every legal strategy to enforce court orders demanding that the Trump administration “facilitate” his release from El Salvador.

From the beginning of the case, officials have acknowledged that Abrego Garcia was wrongfully expelled to El Salvador in violation of a previous court order that expressly barred him being sent to the country.

But the Justice Department, acting on behalf of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, has not given an inch beyond that admission, saying only that if Abrego Garcia presented himself at the U.S. border, officials would “facilitate” his re-entry to the country.

Department lawyers have also spent weeks stonewalling an effort by Judge Paula Xinis, who is overseeing the case, to get answers to the question of what the White House has done, and planned to do, to seek Abrego Garcia’s freedom. The administration’s serial refusals to respond to inquiries about its own behavior in the case has so annoyed Xinis that this week she allowed Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to seek penalties against the government.

According to the indictment, the case against Abrego Garcia dated to Nov. 30, 2022, when he was stopped for speeding by the Tennessee Highway Patrol on Interstate 40 East, in Putnam County. Officers determined that the Chevrolet Suburban he was driving had been altered with “an after-market third row of seats designed to carry additional passengers,” the indictment said.

It also noted that there were “nine Hispanic males packed into the SUV.”

Abrego Garcia told the officers that he and his passengers had been in St. Louis for the past two weeks doing construction work, according to the indictment. But a subsequent investigation, prosecutors said, revealed that Abrego Garcia’s cellphone and license plate reader data showed that he had been in Texas that morning and nowhere near St. Louis for the past weeks.

Moreover, the indictment said, none of the people in the vehicle “had luggage or even tools consistent with construction work.”

Prosecutors said the traffic stop in Tennessee was not the first time that Abrego Garcia had engaged in immigrant smuggling, which, it said, was a “primary source of income.” They added that he had transported about “50 undocumented aliens” a month across the country for several years.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.