Return of Abrego Garcia Raises Questions About Trump’s Views of Justice

For the nearly three months before the Justice Department secured an indictment against the man, it had repeatedly flouted a series of court orders to “facilitate” his release from El Salvador.

When Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Friday that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia had been returned to the United States to face criminal charges after being wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador, she sought to portray the move as the White House dutifully upholding the rule of law.

“This,” she said, “is what American justice looks like.”

Her assertion, however, failed to grapple with the fact that for the nearly three months before the Justice Department secured an indictment against Mr. Abrego Garcia, it had repeatedly flouted a series of court orders — including one from the Supreme Court — to “facilitate” his release.

While the indictment filed against Mr. Abrego Garcia contained serious allegations, accusing him of taking part in a conspiracy to smuggle undocumented immigrants as a member of the street gang MS-13, it had no bearing on the issues that have sat at the heart of the case since his summary expulsion in March.

Those were whether Mr. Abrego Garcia had received due process when he was plucked off the streets without a warrant and expelled days later to a prison in El Salvador, in what even Trump officials have repeatedly admitted was an error. And, moreover, whether administration officials should be held in contempt for repeatedly stonewalling a judge’s effort to get to the bottom of their actions.

Well before Mr. Abrego Garcia’s family filed a lawsuit seeking to force the White House to release him from El Salvador, administration officials had tried all means at their disposal to keep him overseas as they figured out a solution to the problem they had created, The New York Times found in a recent investigation.

In the days before the administration’s error was made public, officials at the Department of Homeland Security discussed portraying Mr. Abrego Garcia as a “leader” of MS-13, even though they could find no evidence to support the claim. They considered ways to nullify the original order that had barred his deportation to El Salvador. And they sought to downplay the danger he might face in one of that country’s most notorious prisons.

To Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, it was no surprise that the same officials who had fought so hard against securing his return suddenly agreed to bring him back to U.S. soil after they had obtained an indictment that bolstered the story they had been telling from the start.

“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 Andrew Rossman, one of the lawyers. “It’s now up to our judicial system to see that Mr. Abrego Garcia receives the due process that the Constitution guarantees.”

Questions have already been raised about the criminal case, filed in Federal District Court in Nashville. There was concern and disagreement in recent weeks among prosecutors about how to proceed with the charges, two people familiar with the matter said, leading to the resignation of a supervisor in the federal prosecutor’s office handling the case.

Regardless of how the case turns out, the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia suggests that the administration was, at least in some ways, feeling the heat of the three court orders it was facing to facilitate his freedom. The decision could be read, in fact, as the Justice Department simultaneously caving to the orders while also flexing its muscles.

By indicting Mr. Abrego Garcia, the department, after all, gave itself the perfect excuse to bring him back to the United States — one that served to avoid a potentially painful confrontation with the Supreme Court and to burnish the administration’s law-and-order image.

And as Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, pointed out on Friday, the charges could render moot the lawsuit filed by Mr. Abrego Garcia’s family. If that happens, it might get the White House off the hook entirely for the way in which it skirted due process in deporting Mr. Abrego Garcia.

Last month, the Justice Department took a somewhat similar approach in the case of Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist employed by Harvard who was detained three months ago after failing to declare scientific samples she was carrying in her luggage. When it appeared as if Ms. Petrova might walk free in her immigration case, prosecutors filed a criminal charge against her for behavior that would ordinarily be treated as a minor infraction, punishable with a fine.

Ms. Petrova’s attorney, Gregory Romanovsky, said at the time that the criminal charge, “filed three months after the alleged customs violation, is clearly intended to make Kseniia look like a criminal to justify their efforts to deport her.”

The Trump administration is facing several other court orders to “facilitate” the return of immigrants who were recently expelled under wrongful or questionable circumstances.

On Wednesday, in a rare example of compliance with a court order, the White House brought back to the United States a Guatemalan man who was deported to Mexico this year in violation of an order forbidding immigrants from being sent to countries not their own without first being given a “meaningful opportunity” to challenge their removal.

It remains unclear what effect the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia will have on a different group of immigrants: the nearly 140 Venezuelan men who were sent to El Salvador on the same set of flights that he was on — albeit under the powers of a different legal tool, a rarely-invoked 18th-century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.

Just a few days ago, a federal judge in Washington, James E. Boasberg, ordered the administration to take steps toward giving the Venezuelan men the due process that they had been denied. But even though they were being held in El Salvador under similar terms as Mr. Abrego Garcia, there was no guarantee that Trump officials would bring them back, said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who has been representing them.

“Clearly, the administration has the technical ability to return people from El Salvador,” Mr. Gelernt said, pointing to the example of Mr. Abrego Garcia. “At a minimum, that reinforces what we have always believed — that the government can bring back anyone it wants, if it actually wants to.”

Our Coverage of U.S. Immigration

• Sending Migrants to Dangerous Countries: As the Trump administration ships migrants to countries around the world, it is abandoning a longstanding U.S. policy of not sending people to places where they would be at risk of torture and other persecution.
• U.S. Returns Abrego Garcia to Face Charges: Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, was flown back to the United States to face charges of transporting undocumented migrants. Here’s what we know.
• Travel Ban: Sick children, families and businesses are among the many people in Haiti, a country plagued by gang violence, likely to be hit hard by a U.S. travel ban.
• Surveillance Program: Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said that the Trump administration was ending a counterterrorism program used to conduct surveillance on air travelers, contending that the program had been exploited to target conservatives.
• Deportees in Djibouti: Homeland Security is holding eight deportees under 24/7 guard at a U.S. military base in Djibouti. It’s unclear how long they’ll be there, or where they’ll be sent next.
• Raids in Puerto Rico: Federal authorities in the U.S. territory have detained more than 500 people since President Trump took office in January. The escalation has upset many Puerto Ricans, who are American citizens.