Trump's Running Tab in the Abrego Garcia Case

The Atlantic

5 hours ago

The Trump administration's long, belabored campaign to prove that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a gang leader, a terrorist, and an all-around bad guy—not a wrongfully deported Maryland man—has produced some extraordinary legal maneuvers. The administration fought Abrego Garcia's return from El Salvador all the way to the Supreme Court, lost, and eventually brought him back to the United States to slap him with criminal charges it had started investigating after it had already sent him to a foreign prison.
But with that criminal case off to a shaky start, the administration is threatening to deport Abrego Garcia again—this time to a country other than his native El Salvador—because the judge has ordered his release while the trial is pending. Having spent months trying to gather evidence against Abrego Garcia, the administration is suggesting it may walk away from it all by sending him to Mexico, Guatemala, or another nation willing to take him.
The threat of Abrego Garcia's imminent re-deportation prompted his attorneys to take the extraordinary step today of asking a district court to delay their client's release and keep him locked up for several more weeks to protect him from ICE. 'The irony of this request is not lost on anyone,' his attorneys told the court. 'In a just world, he would not seek to prolong his detention further.' The lawyers accused the government of pretending to want Abrego Garcia to face 'American justice,' while really only wanting to 'convict him in the court of public opinion.'
The head-spinning developments of the past several days add to the administration's running tab in a case that has challenged its determination to admit no wrongdoing. The case has produced nearly 57,000 pages of documents; ended the Department of Justice careers of one, perhaps two prosecutors; and prompted the Trump administration to cut deals with convicted felons that protect them from deportation in exchange for testimony.
Some of the most remarkable accommodations appear in the transcript of a June 13 pretrial hearing for Abrego Garcia in Tennessee, where the government is trying to convict him of human smuggling. Under cross-examination by defense attorneys, the government's lead investigator, the Department of Homeland Security agent Peter Joseph, told the court that his primary cooperating witness—the source of the most damning testimony—is a twice-convicted felon who had been previously deported five times.
Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes, who was presiding over the hearing, did a double take. 'Sorry. Deported how many times?' she asked.
Joseph, who confirmed the total, said the cooperator has been moved out of prison to a halfway house and is now awaiting a U.S. work permit. He told the court that a second cooperating witness is seeking similar inducements from the government.
Trump and his top officials have said for months that their mass-deportation campaign would prioritize the swift removal of criminals from the United States. But in its effort to punish Abrego Garcia—who does not have a criminal record—the administration is protecting convicted felons from deportation.
Other costs include ending the 15-year career of a Department of Justice attorney, Erez Reuveni, who filed a whistleblower claim with Congress this week alleging that he was fired for refusing to go along with unsubstantiated claims, pushed by the White House, that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 gang leader and a terrorist.
When Reuveni's superiors told him to sign a legal brief making those claims, he refused, saying he 'didn't sign up to lie' when he became a federal prosecutor. He was suspended seven hours later and fired on April 11.
Reuveni's career may not be the only DOJ casualty. Another federal prosecutor, Ben Schrader, the head of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney's office in Nashville, submitted his resignation last month when the government brought Abrego Garcia there to face charges. Schrader, who declined to comment and has not discussed his departure publicly, wrote in a LinkedIn post that 'the only job description I've ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.'
As Reuveni and others have pointed out, ICE officials initially recognized that Abrego Garcia had been deported on March 15 due to an ' administrative error.' His removal from the country was in violation of a 2019 order protecting him from being sent to El Salvador, which he fled at age 16, after a U.S. immigration judge found that he was likely to be attacked by gangs. At that point, the Trump administration could have brought Abrego Garcia back and deported him to another country, or reopened his case to try to strip him of his protected status. But Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the White House aide Stephen Miller, and other administration officials dug in and insisted there was no error. They declared that Abrego Garcia would never come back and never go free in the United States. They launched an all-of-government campaign to make the case about his character, not his due-process rights.
How the Trump administration flipped on Kilmar Abrego Garcia
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement that Abrego Garcia 'is a terrorist illegal alien gang member.' Those who defend him 'should take a good look in the mirror and ask themselves if they really want to side with this heinous illegal criminal,' she said, 'simply because they dislike President Trump.'
'If the answer is yes, they need to seek help,' Jackson added. 'The American people elected President Trump to hold criminals like Abrego Garcia accountable.'
But as attorneys for the Justice Department put it in a court filing Wednesday: 'This is no typical case.'
Not one, but two, overlapping cases will determine Abrego Garcia's fate. The first is the civil lawsuit that Abrego Garcia's wife, a U.S. citizen, filed in district court in Maryland in March, which seeks his release.
The Trump administration opened a second case when it brought Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador earlier this month to face criminal charges in Tennessee. The charges stem from a 2022 highway stop in which Abrego Garcia was pulled over in a Chevrolet Suburban by officers who said he'd been driving 70 miles per hour in a 65-miles-per-hour zone. Police said there were nine passengers in the vehicle and no luggage, raising suspicions of smuggling. Abrego Garcia told officers he was driving construction workers from St. Louis to Maryland on behalf of his boss.
The highway-patrol officers reported the incident to federal authorities, but Abrego Garcia was not charged and allowed to continue the journey. Police-bodycam footage of the stop was obtained and released by the Trump administration as it called him a 'human trafficker' and later alleged, citing unnamed cooperating witnesses, that Abrego Garcia transported thousands of migrants during smuggling trips across the United States as part of a conspiracy dating back to 2016 that earned him roughly $100,000 a year.
Joseph, the Homeland Security investigator, said cooperating witnesses told him more: that Abrego Garcia transported guns and narcotics, that he sexually abused younger female passengers in his care, and that he routinely endangered underage minors, including his own children, whom he left sitting without seat belts on the floor of the vehicle during lengthy trips from Texas to Maryland. The government made its claims to convince Judge Holmes that Abrego Garcia should remain in federal custody while awaiting his criminal trial.
Holmes was not swayed. The defense attorneys representing Abrego Garcia pointed out that the government was relying on stories transmitted through multiple levels of hearsay—claims made outside court, not under oath—by cooperating witnesses seeking some benefit from the government.
'You've got agents going to jails and prisons around the United States right now trying to talk to people who you think might know something about Mr. Abrego?' the federal public defender Dumaka Shabazz asked Joseph, the investigator.
'They have done it through the course of the investigation, yes, sir,' Joseph answered.
Shabazz told the court that the first cooperator, 'despite all of his deportations, his criminal history, being the criminal mastermind behind a transport business,' was 'chilling at the halfway house.'
'He's not in jail. He's not getting deported. He's living his life right here in the United States of America. But he sounds like the exact type of person that this government should be wanting to deport.'
Holmes largely agreed, issuing a decision Sunday denying the government's attempt to keep Abrego Garica locked up. Her decision did not seem to bode well for the evidence and testimony the government is preparing against Abrego Garcia.
Holmes said she gave 'little weight to this hearsay testimony' of the top cooperating witness, whom she called 'a two-time, previously-deported felon, and acknowledged ringleader of a human smuggling operation.' Holmes wrote that she considered the hearsay statements of the second cooperator no more reliable.
Furthermore, she said the testimony and statements 'defy common sense,' because she did not believe the claims that Abrego Garcia drove thousands of miles every week with his children—two of whom have autism—sitting on the floor.
Another federal judge in Tennessee decided on Wednesday that Abrego Garcia should not remain in criminal custody. District Court Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw, who is overseeing the criminal case, said the government had largely failed to prove he was a flight risk or a threat to the community.
The Trump administration made clear that as soon as Abrego Garcia was released, ICE could immediately take him back into custody. Then it played a new card, warning that ICE could try to deport Abrego Garcia before the criminal case goes to trial. By threatening to deport Abrego Garcia again, the government was pressuring his legal team and the judge to agree to his continued detention.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was never coming back. Then he did.
Crenshaw tried to shift responsibility from his courtroom back to the administration, saying the Justice Department needed to convey its deportation concerns to DHS, which oversees ICE, not him. 'If the Government finds this case to be as high priority as it argues here, it is incumbent upon it to ensure that Abrego is held accountable for the charges in the Indictment,' Crenshaw wrote. 'If the Department of Justice and DHS cannot do so, that speaks for itself.'
egotiations over where Abrego Garcia should go next ping-ponged through the courts yesterday, as his lawyers reacted to the administration saying one thing in court and other things publicly.
At first, Abrego Garcia's attorneys in Maryland asked the district court to have him transferred there while he awaits the Tennessee criminal trial. 'Absent order from this Court, the Government will likely shuttle Abrego Garcia elsewhere,' they wrote.
The attorneys said the government's public statements 'leave little doubt about its plan: remove Abrego Garcia to El Salvador once more.' The last time the government detained Abrego Garcia for deportation, they noted, it sent him to detention facilities in Louisiana and Texas, a move they said was part of a 'pattern' in which the administration sends detainees to those states in anticipation that the more conservative federal courts in that circuit are likelier to side with the government.
The administration's position became even more muddled after a Justice Department attorney told the court in Maryland that the administration was indeed planning to deport Abrego Garcia if he's released from custody but would send him to a country other than El Salvador. Abrego Garcia's 2019 protections—the ones the Trump administration violated—prevent his deportation only to El Salvador. The Trump administration has secured agreements with Guatemala, Honduras, and other countries around the region to take back deportees from other nations.
The rushed, blundering effort to send deportees to third countries
Jackson, the White House spokesperson, said on social media last night that the Department of Justice threat to deport Abrego Garcia was 'fake news' and that the criminal case in Tennessee would go forward. 'He will face the full force of the American justice system - including serving time in American prison for the crimes he's committed,' Jackson wrote.
In response to the mixed messages and distrust of the government's intentions, Abrego Garcia's lawyers wrote today that they would rather keep him in jail than trust the administration not to deport him. 'When Mr. Abrego revealed the weaknesses in that case—securing the pretrial release to which he is entitled—the government threatened to remove him to a third country,' they wrote.
Government attorneys said they intend to 'see this case to resolution,' a message echoed by White House officials.
But if Abrego Garcia were poised to walk out of detention and reunite with his family as news cameras rolled, those involved know the administration could be tempted to do something drastic, even if it meant ditching their own case.
'Anything is possible,' an attorney who is tracking the case but did not want to be named told me. 'It seems clear they are committed to not allowing him to be at liberty during the case.'