Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whose erroneous deportation to El Salvador became a protracted battle over due process and a test of wills, has been returned to the United States to face human smuggling charges in Tennessee.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday in a news conference that Abrego Garcia has landed. Abrego Garcia has been named in an indictment charging him with transporting within the U.S. people not legally in the country. The two-count indictment, sealed by a Tennessee court last month, alleges Abrego Garcia participated in a conspiracy over several years to move people from Texas, deeper into the country, NBC News has learned.
The two-count indictment alleges that those transported included members of the MS-13 gang.
A federal judge and the U.S. Supreme Court had long ago ordered the federal government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., but the administration dragged its feet and resisted. At times the administration insisted that Abrego Garcia’s return was up to El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who refused to return him.
The administration had accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of the MS-13 Salvadoran gang and gave that as reason to deport him, despite a judge’s order from 2019 barring him from being sent to his home country.
Garcia was deported March 15 amid a flurry of arrests and deportations after Trunp invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a law only used before in wartime, to target Venezuelan immigrants and other immigrants he alleged to be gang members and “invaders” of the U.S.
He was taken to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, known for its harsh and brutal conditions. Government attorneys had said he was taken there as a result of “administrative error”.
The Supreme Court ruled in April that Abrego Garcia’s removal was “illegal” and determined that a judge’s order for the administration to facilitate his return was proper.
Initially the administration said it had deported Abrego Garcia in error, but as calls for his return intensified, the administration doubled down on keeping him incarcerated in El Salvador.
Despite orders to bring him back, the administration stood its ground over and over, raising concerns about its defiance of the judicial branch and setting off threats of contempt from the bench.
Abrego Garcia’s wife has insisted that he was not involved in criminal activity. “Kilmar worked in construction and sometimes transported groups of workers between job sites, so it’s entirely plausible he would have been pulled over while driving with others in the vehicle,” his wife previously said in a statement. “He was not charged with any crime or cited for any wrongdoing.”
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration just last week to give hundreds of migrants in El Salvador’s CECOT prison the chance to challenge their detentions and removals.
