Abrego Garcia, mistakenly deported, is returned to US to face migrant smuggling charges

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Kilmar Abrego Garcia, mistakenly deported to El Salvador, returned to the U.S. to face charges Friday.
• He is accused of smuggling migrants and transporting firearms and drugs.
• His lawyer denies the charges, citing unreliable witness testimonies from prosecuted individuals.

WASHINGTON — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported from Maryland to El Salvador by the Trump administration, was flown back to the United States to face criminal charges of transporting illegal immigrants within the U.S., Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday.

Abrego Garcia's return marks a turning point in a case that became a flashpoint for critics of President Donald Trump's aggressive immigration policies, who pointed to it as a sign that the administration was disregarding civil liberties in its push to step up deportations.

Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran whose wife and young child in Maryland are U.S. citizens, appeared in federal court in Nashville on Friday evening.

His arraignment was set for June 13, when he will enter a plea, according to local media reports. Until then, he will remain in federal custody.

If he is convicted, he would be deported to El Salvador after serving his sentence, Bondi said. The Trump administration has said Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang, an accusation that his lawyers deny. Officials on Friday portrayed the indictment of Abrego Garcia by a grand jury in Tennessee as vindication of their approach to immigration enforcement.

"The man has a horrible past and I could see a decision being made, bring him back, show everybody how horrible this guy is," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, adding that it was the Justice Department that decided to bring Abrego Garcia back.

According to the indictment, Abrego Garcia worked with at least five co-conspirators as part of a smuggling ring to bring immigrants to the United States illegally, and then transport them from the U.S.-Mexico border to other destinations in the country.

Abrego Garcia often picked up migrants in Houston, and made more than 100 trips between Texas and Maryland between 2016 and 2025, the indictment says.

The indictment also alleges Abrego Garcia transported firearms and drugs. According to the indictment, one of Abrego Garcia's co-conspirators belonging to the same ring was involved in the transportation of migrants whose tractor trailer overturned in Mexico in 2021, resulting in 50 deaths.

Abrego Garcia's lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, called the criminal charges "fantastical" and a "kitchen sink" of allegations.

"This is all based on the statements of individuals who are currently either facing prosecution or in federal prison," he said. "I want to know what they offered those people."

Abrego Garcia was deported on March 15, more than two months before the charges were filed. He was briefly held in a mega-prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, despite an immigration judge's 2019 order barring him from being sent to El Salvador because he would likely be persecuted by gangs.

At a press conference, Bondi said Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had agreed to return Abrego Garcia after 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 at a press conference.

In a court filing on Friday, federal prosecutors asked a judge to have Abrego Garcia detained pending trial.

They said Abrego Garcia got into MS-13 in El Salvador by murdering a rival gang member's mother, citing a co-conspirator whom they did not name. The indictment did not charge Abrego Garcia with murder.

If convicted, Abrego Garcia could face 10 years in prison for each migrant he transported, prosecutors said. That means he could be locked away for the rest of his life, they said.

Tensions with the courts

The case has become a symbol of escalating tensions between the Trump administration and the judiciary, which has blocked a number of the president's signature policies. More recently, the Supreme Court has backed Trump's hardline approach to immigration in other cases.

After his lawyers challenged the basis for his deportation, the 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 opened a probe into what, if anything, the Trump administration had done to secure his return, after his lawyers accused officials of stonewalling their requests for information. That led to concerns among Trump's critics that his administration would openly defy court orders.

In a court filing on Friday, Justice Department lawyers told Xinis that Abrego Garcia's return meant they were in compliance with the order to facilitate his return.

Sandoval-Moshenberg said Abrego Garcia's return did not mean the government was in compliance, asserting that his client must be placed in immigration proceedings before the same judge who handled his 2019 case.

Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator from Maryland who visited Abrego Garcia in El Salvador, said in a statement on Friday that the Trump administration has "finally relented to our demands for compliance with court orders and the due process rights afforded to everyone in the United States."

"The administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along," Van Hollen said.

Contributing: Nate Raymond, Tom Hals, Trevor Hunnicutt and James Oliphant

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The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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