NASHVILLE − The high-ranking federal prosecutor who resigned the day Kilmar Abrego Garcia was indicted has prosecuted major cases and led the massive investigation into a 2020 Christmas Day bombing.
Ben Schrader resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee on May 21 after 10 years, serving as chief of the criminal division since March 2024.
His predecessor called Schrader “one of the best I ever worked with.”
While Schrader has not publicly shared the reason for his resignation and declined to speak for this story, Reuters and ABC News reported Abrego Garcia’s indictment led to Schrader’s departure, based on conversations with unnamed sources.
He called his tenure in the office an “incredible privilege.”
“It has been an incredible privilege to serve as a prosecutor with the Department of Justice, where the only job description I’ve ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons,” Schrader wrote in a post to LinkedIn the day he left the prosecutor’s office.
The federal government illegally deported Abrego Garcia on March 15 to El Salvador, where he was imprisoned at a maximum-security prison. He was incarcerated for two months without being charged with a crime.
Abrego Garcia’s deportation, which occurred while he had a protective order barring his expulsion from the country, sparked outrage and prompted a rebuke from all levels of the judiciary. A district judge in Maryland ruled the Trump administration acted illegally, and the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the government to begin the process of retruning him on April 10.
The Trump administration dug in its heels, refusing to bring Abrego Garcia back and maintaining that he is a member of the gang MS-13, an allegation included in the recently unsealed federal indictment. In May, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Abrego Garcia would never return.
Abrego Garcia was indicted in the U.S District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee May 21 on charges of conspiracy to transport aliens and unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens.
The case hit the news on June 6, when the indictment was unsealed and the government brought Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. He is scheduled to return to court on June 13, where federal prosecutors will argue he needs to be detained while the charges are pending. He is in U.S. Marshals custody; the Marshal’s Office said it does not share the location of pre-trial detainees.
Schrader, a native of the Tampa area, attended Yale University and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in history in 2003, while also studying African history at Oxford University for a semester in 2002. He attended Vanderbilt Law School in 2006 and graduated in 2009.
Schrader began his legal career in 2010 as an assistant U.S. attorney in the federal prosecutor’s office in Washington, D.C. In 2015, he came to the Middle District of Tennessee.
Big cases
From 2017 to 2023, the chief of the office’s criminal division was Brent Hannafan.
“Ben is one of the best AUSAs I ever worked with,” Hannafan wrote in an email. “He’s smart, diligent, and resourceful. He was both well-liked by his colleagues and law enforcement agents and respected by the Judges.”
Hannafan said Schrader was the attorney who led the investigation into the 2020 Christmas Day bombing, which destroyed dozens of buildings in and around Second Avenue in Nashville.
“Your leadership in the Nashville bombing is unmatched and the city owes you such a debt for your dedication in investigating what happened downtown,” a former colleague commented on Schrader’s resignation post on LinkedIn.
One of Schrader’s most notable prosecutions was of Wesley Somers − referred to as “the face of the attempt to burn down City Hall” in court records. During protests against the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Somers was caught on camera lighting a sign on fire, placing it through a window of the Nashville Metropolitan Courthouse and spraying accelerant on the fire. Somers pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison in 2022.
Another major case was Schrader’s prosecution of six defendants in a RICO case in Clarksville, where members of the Gangsters Disciples street gang engaged in drug trafficking, murder and witness intimidation for more than a decade. The defendants were sentenced to dozens of years in prison in 2019.
Schrader and Hannafan tried two cases together, Hannafan said, including a 2015 case in which a Texas couple convicted of drug dealing and money laundering were sentenced to 20 years in prison. Hannafan called Schrader an “outstanding trial attorney.”
Evan Mealins is the justice reporter for The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. Contact him with questions, tips or story ideas at emealins@tennessean.com.
This article originally appeared on USATNetwork: Who’s Ben Schrader? Prosecutor quit the day Abrego Garcia was indicted
