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08-06-2025
WASHINGTON/ SAN SALVADOR: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old from El Salvador mistakenly deported in March, has been returned to the US to face prosecution on two federal criminal charges.
He has been accused of participating in a trafficking conspiracy over several years to move undocumented migrants from Texas to other parts of the country.
El Salvador agreed to release Abrego Garcia after the US presented it with an arrest warrant, Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday. His lawyer called the charges “preposterous”.
The White House had been resisting a US Supreme Court order from April to “facilitate” his return after he was sent to a jail in El Salvador alongside more than 250 other deportees.
In a two-count grand jury indictment, filed in a Tennessee court last month and unsealed on Friday, Abrego Garcia was charged with one count of conspiracy to transport aliens and a second count of unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens.
Bondi said the grand jury had found that Abrego Garcia had played a “significant role” in an alien smuggling ring, bringing in thousands of illegal immigrants to the US.
The allegations, which date back to 2016, allege he transported undocumented individuals between Texas and Maryland and other states more than 100 times.
The indictment additionally alleges he transported members of MS-13, designated a foreign terrorist organization by the US.
The Trump administration had previously alleged Abrego Garcia was a member of the transnational Salvadorian gang, which he has denied.
Bondi also accused Abrego Garcia of trafficking weapons and narcotics into the US for the gang, though he was not charged with any related offences.
He appeared in court for an initial hearing on Friday in Nashville, Tennessee. An arraignment hearing is scheduled 13 June, where US Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes will determine if there are grounds to keep him detained ahead of his trial.
For now, Abrego Garcia remains in federal custody.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have previously argued that he has never been convicted of any criminal offence including gang membership, in the US or in El Salvador.
Simon Sandoval Moshenberg, one of his attorneys, called the charges “preposterous” and the events an “abuse of power” at a Friday news conference.
“The government disappeared Kilmar to a foreign prison in violation of a court order,” Moshenberg said. “Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him.”
He added; “this is an abuse of power, not justice. The government should give him a full and fair trial in front of the same immigration judge who heard the case in 2019.”
Speaking to reporters on Friday, President Donald Trump called Abrego Garcia a “bad guy” and said the Department of Justice had made the right decision to return him to US soil to face trial.
Abrego Garcia entered the US illegally as a teenager from El Salvador. In 2019, he was arrested with three other men in Maryland and detained by federal immigration authorities but an immigration judge granted him protection from deportation on the grounds that he might be at risk of persecution from local gangs in his home country.
On 15 March, he was deported amid an immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law that allows presidents to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy country.
Abrego Garcia was taken to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador, known for its brutal conditions. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
