Kilmar Abrego Garcia charged with illegally transporting migrants

By Chris Strohm, Myles Miller and Bob Van Voris

  Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man mistakenly deported by the Trump administration to a prison in El Salvador, has been brought back to the US to face federal charges that he illegally transported undocumented immigrants within the country. 

Abrego Garcia was indicted by a grand jury in Tennessee in May, according to court filings. He appeared in a Tennessee courtroom Friday, hours after he was returned to the US, ABC reported. Attorney General Pam Bondi said an investigation determined that he was member of the criminal gang MS-13 and a “danger to our community.”

 

Abrego Garcia’s case became a lightning rod over President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, which have seen the administration move to ramp up deportations of undocumented migrants. The Supreme Court had told the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.  

 

“Our government presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant and they agreed to return him to our country,” Bondi said at a press conference in Washington. “Upon completion of sentence we anticipate he will be returned to his home country of El Salvador.”

 

The US is seeking to have Abrego Garcia detained as a flight risk and a danger. The charges could result in him spending the rest of his life behind bars, prosecutors said.

 

“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,” Andrew Rossman, a lawyer for Abrego Garcia, said in an emailed statement. “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.”

 

According to court documents, Abrego Garcia’s role, with other unidentified people, was to pick up migrants in the Houston area after they’d illegally crossed the border into Texas, then move them to other parts of the country. Abrego Garcia and other members of the group also allegedly transported guns and drugs illegally purchased in Texas into Maryland. 

 

Before he was removed from the country, an immigration judge had ruled that Abrego Garcia could not be sent to his home country of El Salvador, finding that he would be at risk of harm under the Convention Against Torture. The government later admitted he’d been deported to El Salvador in error. 

 

After he was removed from the country in March, his lawyers asked a federal court in Maryland to order his return to the US. Abrego Garica was initially kept in El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, but was later moved to another facility.

 

On April 10, the US Supreme Court agreed with US District Judge Paula Xinis that Abrego Garcia shouldn’t have been deported and ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” his release from Salvadoran custody. Trump and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele initially responded by claiming they had no power to return Abrego Garcia.

 

Xinis then ordered the government to answer questions detailing its efforts to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. A US appeals court upheld the order in a harshly critical opinion on April 17.

 

“Thanks to the bright light that has been shined on Abrego Garcia, this investigation continued,” Bondi said Friday.

 

Chris Van Hollen, the Maryland Democratic senator who visited Abrego Garcia in El Salvador, said that the administration will now “have to make its case in the court of law.”

 

“For months the Trump administration flouted the Supreme Court and our Constitution,” Van Hollen said. “Today, they appear to have finally relented to our demands for compliance with court orders and with the due process rights afforded to everyone in the United States.”