By Sarah N. Lynch and Luc Cohen
(Reuters) -Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported from Maryland to El Salvador by the Trump administration, has returned to the United States to face criminal charges of transporting illegal immigrants to the U.S., Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday.
Abrego Garcia faces two criminal counts in an indictment filed in federal court in Tennessee on May 21, more than two months after Abrego Garcia’s March 15 deportation, court records showed.
Bondi said Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele agreed to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. after U.S. officials presented his government with an arrest warrant.
“The grand jury found that over the past nine years, Abrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring,” Bondi said in a press conference.
In a statement, Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, Andrew Rossman, said it would now be up to the U.S. judicial system to ensure he received due process.
“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,” said Rossman, a partner at law firm Quinn Emanuel.
Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador, despite an immigration judge’s 2019 order granting him protection from deportation to El Salvador after finding he was likely to be persecuted by gangs if returned there, court records show.
Critics of President Donald Trump pointed to the erroneous deportation as an example of the excesses of the Republican president’s aggressive approach to stepping up deportations.
Officials countered by alleging that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang. His lawyers have denied that Abrego Garcia was a member of the gang and said he had not been charged with or convicted of any crime.
His case has also become a flash point for escalating tensions between the executive branch and the judiciary, which has ruled against a number of Trump’s policies. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, with liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor saying the government had cited no basis for what she called his “warrantless arrest.”
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis has since opened a probe into what, if anything, the Trump administration has done to secure his return, after his lawyers accused officials of stonewalling their requests for information.
The indictment also charges Abrego Garcia and two unidentified co-conspirators with transporting firearms illegally purchased in Texas for resale in Maryland.
Abrego Garcia also transported illegal narcotics purchased in Texas for resale in Maryland and was on some occasions accompanied on those trips by members and associates of MS-13, according to the indictment.
(Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto, Sarah N. Lynch in Washington and by Luc Cohen in New York; additional reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Sandra Maler)
