Wrongly-Removed Maryland Man Kilmar Abrego Garcia On Way Back to U.S. to Face Criminal Charges
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was wrongly removed from the U.S. without due process by the Trump administration and imprisoned in El Salvador, will return stateside to face criminal charges, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Friday.
More than two months after Trump administration officials said in court documents they removed him in violation of a court order, Bondi said a federal grand jury has indicted Abrego Garcia for allegedly transporting undocumented migrants within the U.S.
Abrego Garcia’s removal sparked outrage across the U.S. amid rising concerns about President Donald Trump’s effort to undermine the right to due process by summarily deporting both legal and nonlegal migrants from the country.
Abrego Garcia’s reported return comes after weeks of the Trump administration claiming in public and in court documents that it would not return him to the U.S. to receive due process before a court of law.
Before his removal, Abrego Garcia, who has a wife and son who are U.S. citizens, lived in Maryland for about 15 years. He worked as a sheet metal apprentice and is a member of the SMART labor union, which has denounced his arrest.
Bondi in the news conference claimed Abrego Garcia played a “significant role in an alien smuggling ring,” alleging that was his full-time job.
The indictment against Abrego Garcia, which was filed last month but released Friday afternoon, alleged that he and unnamed co-conspirators, “communicated with each other using cellular telephones and social media applications to facilitate the unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens without authorization to and throughout the United States.”
The indictment, which was filed in a federal court in Tennessee, further claims that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 gang member, a designation Trump has attempted to pin on him since facing public pushback against his removal.
The indictment appears to stem from a 2022 traffic stop of Abrego Garcia that ended with a warning to get his expired license renewed. In police footage of the traffic stop, Abrego Garcia is seen behind the wheel of an SVU with around eight other people inside the vehicle.
Abrego Garcia is heard telling officers that he was driving fellow construction workers from St. Louis back to Maryland. A Tennessee trooper suspected Abrego Garcia of carrying undocumented immigrants from Texas to Maryland. Federal officials contacted by the Tennessee trooper over the situation said there was no need to detain Abrego Garcia and no charges were filed.
Ben Schrader, the former chief of the criminal division for the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville, abruptly departed the Department of Justice after the indictment was fired, ABC News reported. Sources told the news outlet that Schrader resigned over concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons.
To claim Abrego Garcia was a gang member, Trump went as far as holding up a photo of Abrego Garcia’s knuckles clearly doctored to read “MS-13.”
The Trump administration continued to refuse to free Abrego Garcia from an El Salvador prison even after the Supreme Court ordered the government to “facilitate” his return.
Federal judges appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents in a lawsuit challenging Abrego Garcia’s removal condemned the Trump administration for continuing to argue that it erred in transferring him to El Salvador but couldn’t do anything to bring him back.
In a ruling in April, 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, ripped the Trump administration for continuing to defend the error in court.
“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” Wilkinson wrote. “Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.”
“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) accused the Trump administration Friday of “ignoring our Constitution” for months but said it “has relented to our demands for compliance with court orders and due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia.”
Van Hollen visited Abrego Garcia earlier this year. Around the time of the visit, Abrego Garcia was transferred from a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador known as CECOT to another facility.
“This has never been about the man — it’s about his constitutional rights and the rights of all,” Van Hollen said.
In 2019, an immigration judge ruled that Abrego Garcia, who entered the country illegally, could not be deported to El Salvador after finding he was likely to be persecuted and tortured by gangs that extorted his family there.
The same night the government removed Abrego Garcia from the U.S., hundreds of other men were also flown and imprisoned in CECOT. Like Abrego Garcia, many of those men also had never been convicted of crimes and were deported without due process.
Unlike Abrego Garcia, they were removed under Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used emergency wartime law.
This is a breaking news story. Please check back for additional details.