Kilmar Abrego Garcia is back in US custody after being illegally deported and will now face criminal charges

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran native whose deportation by the Trump administration was declared illegal by the Supreme Court and generated a national furor, is back in U.S. custody and will face federal human trafficking charges in Tennessee.

Abrego Garcia was secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in Nashville last month on two felony charges: transporting undocumented immigrants and conspiring with others to do so. The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, when police found Abrego Garcia at the wheel of an SUV carrying nine other men, all of whom were Hispanic and lacked identification, according to the indictment.

The indictment was unsealed Friday after Trump administration officials acknowledged Abrego Garcia was in custody of U.S. authorities. Abrego Garcia’s return was first reported by ABC News.

Abrego Garcia’s return follows months of extraordinary brinkmanship between the Trump administration and federal courts, a Supreme Court rebuke, diplomatic intrigue and a domestic political crisis over the episode.

Abrego Garcia, who allegedly entered the U.S. illegally more than a decade ago, had been living in Maryland when the Trump administration arrested him, put him on a plane and deposited him at a notorious Salvadoran prison on March 15. The deportation violated a 2019 immigration-court order that barred the U.S. from sending him to El Salvador because he was at risk of being targeted by a local gang. The Supreme Court and other judges said he was illegally denied due process, and in court papers, a Justice Department lawyer acknowledged that the deportation was an error — a position that the administration soon renounced.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return. For months, the administration publicly resisted that order. At times, Trump and his top aides suggested Abrego Garcia would never return to the United States.

“There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said last month during a hearing before a Senate appropriations panel.

The administration’s reversal comes with a significant cost for Abrego Garcia: federal criminal charges that could result in decades in prison.

“The government disappeared Kilmar to a foreign prison in violation of a court order. Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him,” his attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, said in a statement. “This shows that they were playing games with the court all along. Due process means the chance to defend yourself before you’re punished, not after.”

The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw, an Obama appointee confirmed 92-0 by the Senate in 2016. Crenshaw was the presiding judge in a corruption case involving a Tennessee state senator, Brian Kelsey, recently pardoned by Trump.

The Trump administration had insisted that it had no power to compel El Salvador to return Abrego Garcia, but in recent weeks there were signs that officials had begun to engage with El Salvador and its president, Nayib Bukele, about bringing Abrego Garcia back to the United States.

“Our government presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant, and they agreed to return him to our country,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday during a press conference at Justice Department headquarters. “We’re grateful to President Bukele for agreeing to return him to our country to face these very serious charges.”

In a separate legal case involving another improperly deported immigrant, Homeland Security officials revealed earlier this week that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a longstanding personal relationship with Bukele and was using it to advance negotiations. But the administration also repeatedly refused to provide more details, instead invoking the “state secrets” privilege and other authorities to refuse to detail their efforts.

It’s unclear whether Abrego Garcia’s return will have implications for other people deemed by courts to have been improperly deported. A federal judge in Maryland ordered the administration to facilitate the return of a Venezuelan man, Daniel Lozano-Camargo, from El Salvador’s custody last month. Earlier Friday, the administration declined to provide a substantive update on Lozano-Camargo’s whereabouts, saying they were the subject of high-level negotiations between the State Department and El Salvador.

The issue of the erroneous deportations exploded on Capitol Hill, where Democrats used it to underscore the extraordinary assertions of power and violations of due process underlying Trump’s mass deportation policy. Some, like Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) made trips to El Salvador and attempted to meet with Abrego Garcia, while others were given an audience with senior Salvadoran officials and a tour of CECOT, the notorious anti-terrorism prison where Abrego Garcia was first taken. (He was later moved to a different facility.)

Van Hollen welcomed the news of Abrego Garcia’s return, saying it would vindicate his due process rights.

“The Administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along,” he said.

Prosecutors said that Abrego Garcia could face up to 10 years in prison for each undocumented immigrant he transported — effectively a life sentence. However, defendants typically are sentenced under federal sentencing guidelines, which usually call for sentences far shorter than the maximum.

In a request to the federal court in Nashville to keep Abrego Garcia locked up pending trial, prosecutors leveled a series of serious allegations against the Salvadoran native, including that he was a serial trafficker of undocumented immigrants and was involved in the abuse of children. Prosecutors also accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang.

“This was his full-time job,” Bondi said. “He was a smuggler of humans and children and women. … Thousands of illegal aliens were smuggled.”

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, though, said the allegations were spurious and should be “treated with suspicion” because of the Trump administration’s effort to publicly assail Abrego Garcia’s character throughout his detention in El Salvador.

Until the new indictment, he had never been charged with a crime. Before his deportation, he had been a metal worker in Maryland and had been living with his wife and children, all U.S. citizens.

“They’ll stop at nothing at all — even some of the most preposterous charges imaginable — just to avoid admitting that they made a mistake, which is what everyone knows happened,” Sandoval-Moshenberg told reporters Friday. “He’s not going to be convicted of these crimes. There’s no way a jury is going to see the evidence and agree that this sheet metal worker is the leader of an international MS-13 smuggling conspiracy.”

In a court filing, prosecutors said Abrego Garcia “transported approximately 50 undocumented aliens throughout the United States per month for several years.” They also alleged that Abrego Garcia “solicited nude photographs and videos of a minor, beginning in approximately 2020.”

Abrego Garcia, however, is not charged with any crime related to child sexual abuse material.

Bondi attributed some of the allegations against Abrego Garcia to “co-conspirators,” and she acknowledged that he does not currently face any charges besides the two counts related to alleged smuggling of undocumented immigrants.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said they are making urgent plans to meet with him.

Sandoval-Moshenberg suggested the criminal charges amounted to a kind of retaliation for the negative publicity the case brought to the Trump administration. The attorney said Abrego-Garcia’s return could allow him to shed more light on the conditions at CECOT, where he was held for a period and where more than 200 other men deported from the U.S. are believed to remain.

Bondi asserted Friday that the Justice Department’s intense scrutiny of Abrego Garcia had led to the break-up of the human smuggling ring he was allegedly involved in, although she did not announce any charges against anyone else.

Abrego Garcia arrived in Nashville Friday, according to ABC News, which posted a photo of him being escorted out of a private terminal at the airport there. He was scheduled to appear before a federal magistrate judge in Nashville later in the day, a Justice Department spokesperson said.