DOJ Brings Kilmar Abrego Garcia Back to the U.S. After Insisting It Couldn't

Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned to the U.S. to appear in court on Friday, more than two months after being deported to a prison in El Salvador, the country of his birth. No matter how the trial shakes out, it's just the latest example of the Trump administration playing fast and loose with both the facts and the law.

Abrego Garcia was charged with two federal counts of trafficking. The grand jury indictment says Abrego Garcia "was a member and associate of the transnational criminal organization…MS-13" and conspired to transport "undocumented aliens and narcotics" and "firearms" into and across the U.S.

These claims seem to stem from a 2022 traffic stop when the Tennessee Highway Patrol stopped Abrego Garcia for speeding while driving a vehicle with multiple passengers. At the time, he told police they were coming from St. Louis, where they had been working in construction; he was not detained.

The indictment says data from license plate readers showed the vehicle "had not been near St. Louis in the past twelve months and, in fact, had been in the Houston, Texas area."

"Unfortunately, Kilmar is currently imprisoned without contact with the outside world, which means he cannot respond to the claims," Abrego Garcia's wife said in April, when details of the traffic stop were made public.

Indeed, a court of law is the best place to adjudicate those claims, but there is evidence that the government may have cooked up the charges in order to retroactively justify the case: On May 21, the same day the grand jury returned the indictment, Ben Schrader, head of the Nashville U.S. Attorney's Office's Criminal Division, resigned. Sources told ABC News it was "prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons."

The case has been controversial from the start: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Abrego Garcia on March 12; three days later he was deported to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), an overcrowded Salvadoran maximum security prison whose director says its inmates are "psychopaths who will be difficult to rehabilitate" and therefore "will never leave."

But an immigration judge in 2019 had granted Abrego Garcia "withholding of removal, thereby protecting him from return to his native country, El Salvador," as Judge Paula Xinis of the U.S. District Court of Maryland wrote in April.

When the Trump administration deported him, it did so in violation of this protective order, sending him to the one place it was forbidden to do so. "Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error," the government admitted in a March 31 court filing.

Indeed, the administration was apparently blindsided by the news, as Hamed Aleaziz and Alan Feuer reported last month in The New York Times. Citing internal documents, Aleaziz and Feuer detailed how the administration feverishly tried to retroactively justify the deportation, either by nullifying the 2019 order or by portraying Abrego Garcia as a "leader" of MS-13 "even though they could find no evidence to support the claim."

"This was an administrative error," one Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official wrote in an email, before adding, "Not that we should say publicly."

Publicly, the administration claimed Abrego Garcia's knuckle tattoos indicated MS-13 membership—though President Donald Trump himself seemed to mistake the White House's Photoshopped labels with Abrego Garcia's actual tattoos.

Xinis "order[ed] that [the administration] return Abrego Garcia to the United States." The Supreme Court intervened, staying Xinis' order but otherwise affirming its finding to "facilitate…the return of [Abrego Garcia] to the United States by no later than 11:59 PM on Monday, April 7."

But the administration refused, illogically claiming it had no right to do so. During an Oval Office meeting in April, both Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele mocked the idea of returning Abrego Garcia to the U.S. "I don't have the power to return him to the United States," Bukele said. In a legal filing that same day, DHS acting general counsel Joseph Mazzarra said the department "does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation."

"He is not coming back to our country," Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News. "President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That's the end of the story."

So, the news on Friday that Abrego Garcia was coming back—and at the Department of Justice's direction, no less—was a bit stunning.

But even though the indictment could very well just be retroactive justification for deporting someone in violation of numerous court orders, it remains the case that a court of law is the ideal place to adjudicate allegations against Abrego Garcia—not unsourced allegations delivered in press conferences and on social media.

"Is it possible that [fellow deportee Andry José] Hernández Romero, Abrego Garcia, and others are members of a gang? It is. It is also possible they are not," wrote Billy Binion in the July 2025 issue of Reason. Finding out whether they deserve to be in prison before sending them there is fundamental to due process.

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