U.S. Reps. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., at left, and Juan Vargas, D-Calif., maintain photos of Kilmar Abrego Garcia throughout a information convention to debate Abrego Garcia’s arrest and deportation, on the Cannon Home Workplace Constructing in Washington, April 9, 2025.
Alex Wong | Getty Pictures
Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was returned to the US to face prison costs Friday, months after he was mistakenly deported to a jail in his native El Salvador.
Abrego Garcia has been indicted in federal courtroom in Tennessee on a cost associated to transporting undocumented migrants inside the US.
The indictment alleges that Abrego Garcia and others from 2016 by way of 2025 “conspired to deliver undocumented aliens to the US from international locations resembling Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador, and elsewhere, finally passing by way of Mexico earlier than crossing into Texas.”
The grand jury that issued the indictment discovered that he made greater than 100 journeys smuggling 1000’s of immigrants.
The indictment was issued Might 21 however remained sealed till Friday, shortly earlier than Lawyer Basic Pam Bondi introduced at a press convention that Abrego Garcia had been returned.
“The federal government disappeared Kilmar to a international jail in violation of a courtroom order. Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him again, to not appropriate their error however to prosecute him,” Abrego Garcia’s lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg stated in an announcement to NBC 4 in Washington, D.C.
“”This reveals that they had been taking part in video games with the courtroom all alongside. Due course of means the possibility to defend your self earlier than you are punished, not after. That is an abuse of energy, not justice,” Sandoval-Moshenberg stated.
The federal government ought to put him on trial, yes-but in entrance of the identical immigration decide who heard his case in 2019, which is the peculiar method of doing issues, ‘to make sure that his case is dealt with as it could have been had he not been improperly despatched to El Salvador,’ because the Supreme Courtroom ordered.”
The Trump administration says Abrego Garcia is a member of the infamous gang MS-13, which the U.S. considers a international terrorist group. He denies belonging to the gang,
The married father of three was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement brokers in Maryland on March 12.
He was deported three days later in what the administration later conceded was a mistake.
Abrego Garcia was topic to a 2019 withholding order by a decide forbidding his removing to El Salvador due to considerations he can be persecuted there.
Regardless of its admission that he mustn’t have been eliminated, the Trump administration has claimed it couldn’t get Abrego Garcia again to the US, even after a Maryland U.S. District Courtroom decide ordered federal officers to facilitate his return.
The Supreme Courtroom on in April upheld that order.
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