A federal judge has concluded that the Department of Justice’s prosecution of Kilmar Ábrego García on human smuggling charges may be an illegal retaliation after he successfully sued the Trump administration over his deportation to El Salvador.
The case of Ábrego García, a Salvadoran national who was a construction worker in Maryland, has become a proxy for the partisan struggle over Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration policy and mass deportation agenda.
US district court judge Waverly Crenshaw granted a request late on Friday by lawyers for Ábrego García and ordered discovery and an evidentiary hearing in Ábrego García’s effort to show that the federal human smuggling case against him in Tennessee is illegally retaliatory.
Crenshaw said Ábrego García had shown that there is “some evidence that the prosecution against him may be vindictive”. That evidence included statements by various Trump administration officials and the timeline of the charges being filed.
The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security did not immediately respond to inquiries about the case on Saturday.
In his 16-page ruling, Crenshaw said many statements by Trump administration officials “raise cause for concern”, but one stood out.
That statement, by the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, on a Fox News program after Ábrego García was charged in June, seemed to suggest that the Department of Justice charged him because he won his wrongful deportation case, Crenshaw wrote.
Blanche’s ”remarkable statements could directly establish that the motivations for Ábrego’s criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights” to sue over his deportation “rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct”, Crenshaw wrote.
Likewise, Crenshaw noted that the Department of Homeland Security reopened an investigation into Ábrego García days after the US supreme court said in April that the Trump administration must work to bring him back.
Ábrego García was indicted on 21 May and charged on 6 June, the day the US returned him from a prison in El Salvador. He pleaded not guilty and is now being held in Pennsylvania.
If convicted in the Tennessee case, Ábrego García will be deported, federal officials have said. A US immigration judge has denied Ábrego García’s bid for asylum, although he can appeal.
The Salvadoran national has an American wife and children and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the United States illegally as a teenager.
In 2019, he was arrested by immigration agents. He requested asylum but was not eligible because he had been in the US for more than a year. But the judge ruled he could not be deported to El Salvador, where he faced danger from a gang that targeted his family.
The human smuggling charges in Tennessee stem from a 2022 traffic stop. He was not charged at the time.
Trump administration officials have waged a relentless public relations campaign against Ábrego García, repeatedly referring to him as a member of the MS-13 gang, among other things, despite the fact he has not been convicted of any crimes.
Ábrego García’s attorneys have denounced the criminal charges and the deportation efforts, saying they are an attempt to punish him for standing up to the administration.
Ábrego García contends that, while imprisoned in El Salvador, he suffered beatings, sleep deprivation and psychological torture. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has denied those allegations.
