MS-13 gangbanger Kilmar Abrego Garcia entered a Tennessee courtroom in chains hours after he was returned to US soil from El Salvador to face charges of trafficking thousands of illegal immigrants — his “full-time job” for years, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Friday.
“He was a smuggler of humans and children and women” — including members of the murderous prison gang he belonged to, the AG said at a press conference announcing the federal charges.
“One hundred trips, the grand jury found, of smuggling people throughout our country,” Bondi said.
Co-conspirators also alleged that Abrego Garcia solicited nude photos of a minor, abused women he was transporting — and was involved in the murder of a rival gang member’s mother, Bondi said.
The purported gang member, who was wrongly deported in March, was shackled hand and foot when he appeared in a Middle District of Tennessee courtroom Friday, flanked by Homeland Security agents, according to local reports.
Abrego Garcia told US Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes – in Spanish – that he understood the charges leveled against him, as DHS and ICE officials tussled over his custody, ABC News and WKRN reported.
He will remain in the custody of the US Marshals and will be arraigned June 13 at 10 a.m.
Abrego Garcia’s attorney slammed the charges as “an abuse of power.”
“They’ll stop at nothing at all – even some of the most preposterous charges imaginable – to avoid admitting that they made a mistake, which is what everyone knows happened in this case,” Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said during an online press conference, ABC reported.
“Mr. Garcia is going to be vigorously defending the charges against him.”
A federal grand-jury indictment was handed up May 21 in Tennessee charging Abrego Garcia, 29, with participating in a conspiracy to move illegal migrants from countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Ecuador through Mexico and into Texas, where they would then be smuggled to Maryland and other states.
“The grand jury found that over the past nine years, Abrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring,” Bondi said. “They found this was his full-time job — not a contractor.
“They were using vehicles, SUVs with added seats in the back, floors that had been ripped out,” she said. “Guns, narcotics, children, women, MS-13 members — that is what the grand jury found.”
Abrego Garcia at one point demanded asylum in the US, claiming he was afraid gang members would kill him if he returned to El Salvador — but that’s only because of “the defendant’s own actions in participating in the murder of a rival 18th Street gang member’s mother,” according to an additional court filing calling for his detention.
In addition, Abrego Garcia “solicited nude photographs and videos of a minor, beginning in approximately 2020,” the feds said.
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“These facts demonstrate Abrego Garcia is a danger to our community,” the attorney general said. “Upon completion of his sentence, we anticipate he will be returned to his home country of El Salvador.”
President Trump hailed the Justice Department’s decision to bring Abrego Garcia back to the US to face the charges.
“Bringing him back, you can show how bad he is,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Friday. “He’s a bad guy.”
Abrego Garcia, who entered the US illegally in 2011, and his co-conspirators trafficked thousands of illegal migrants from Mexico and Central America, including members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13, in exchange for money, according to the indictment.
They would force kids to sit on the floor “in order to maximize profits,” the document said.
During the course of the operation, one of Abrego Garcia’s co-conspirators was arrested and deported for alien smuggling, according to the court documents, but was later released, re-entered the US and returned to work with him.
Prosecutors linked the operation Abrego Garcia was allegedly involved in to a 2021 tractor-trailer crash in Mexico that killed more than 50 of the 160 migrants being transported on board.
The crew, which typically picked up migrants in the Houston area, covered their tracks by devising stories to tell law enforcement and confiscating immigrants’ cell phones so they could not contact anyone until the trip was over, according to the indictment.
Abrego Garcia’s charges partly involve a 2022 vehicle stop in Tennessee.
In body-camera footage that surfaced last month as the feds publicly built their case against him, Abrego Garcia can be seen driving seven other people – all without luggage – on a days-long trip from Texas to Maryland.
A state trooper can be heard speculating that Abrego Garcia, who had $1,400 cash on him, “was hauling these people for money” but ultimately let him go with only a citation for an expired license.
He was arrested March 12 in Baltimore amid trafficking and other accusations, including that he had MS-13 ties, and was soon deported to El Salvador.
The Trump administration defended the move despite intense backlash, including from the courts, which ruled that the suspect was illegally deported.
“The Justice Department’s Grand Jury Indictment against Abrego Garcia proves the unhinged Democrat Party was wrong, and their stenographers in the Fake News Media were once again played like fools,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement after his indictment.
“Abrego Garcia was never an innocent ‘Maryland Man’– Abrego Garcia is an illegal alien terrorist, gang member, and human trafficker who has spent his entire life abusing innocent people, especially women and the most vulnerable,” Leavitt continued.
She singled out Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who was a vocal critic of Abrego Garcia’s deportation, and demanded he apologize to the accused gangbanger’s victims.
Van Hollen instead celebrated the return of his constituent to the US as proof that the Trump administration “finally relented to our demands for compliance with court orders.
“As I have repeatedly said, this is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights – and the rights of all,” said Van Hollen, who met Abrego Garcia for drinks at a San Salvador hotel in April, in a statement. “The Administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”
A Maryland federal judge had ordered Abrego Garcia’s return to the US on April 4. In a Friday filing, Justice Department attorneys said the Trump administration had complied with that ruling and asked for the underlying case to be dismissed.
“The reason why he is back and was returned is because there was an arrest warrant,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters.
“As far as whether it makes the ongoing litigation in Maryland moot, I would think so, but we don’t know about this. He just landed today.”
