3 days ago
Abrego Garcia, mistakenly deported to El Salvador, returns to US to face criminal charges
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man who was mistakenly deported from Maryland to his native El Salvador by the Donald Trump administration, has been charged with transporting illegal immigrants in the US.
Garcia has arrived back in the US to face the criminal charges levelled against him.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi, during a press briefing, said that Garcia has "landed in the United States to face justice. He will face very serious charges".
"Upon completion of his sentence, we anticipate he will be returned to his home country of El Salvador," she added.
A federal court in Tennessee charged Garcia with conspiring to transport illegal immigrants into America. The indictment was filed on May 21, more than two months after his deportation on March 15, court records were reportedly cited.
The human trafficking charges stemmed from a 2022 vehicle stop in which the Tennessee Highway Patrol suspected him. A report from the Department of Homeland Security in April said that none of the people in the vehicle carried any luggage, and they also listed the same address as Abrego Garcia.
Garcia was never charged with a crime, while the officers allowed him to drive on with a mere warning over an expired driver's license, the DHS report added.
The report further mentioned that he was travelling from Texas to Maryland, via Missouri, to bring in people for construction work.
Meanwhile, Garcia's lawyer, Andrew Rossman, said that it would now be up to the US judicial system to ensure that he received due procedure.
"Today's action proves what we've known all along — that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so," Rossman was quoted as saying.
As per court records, Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador despite having an immigration judge's order from 2019, which granted him protection from deportation to his native country after finding he was likely to be abused by gangs if returned there.
Critics of Trump used this instance as an example to talk about the President's excessively aggressive approach to deportations.
While officials defended his deportation, saying that Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang. The El Salvador-native's lawyers have dismissed the claims of him being a gang member and said that he had not been charged with or convicted of any crime.
Additionally, the US Supreme Court had ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return, with liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor saying the government cited no basis for what she called his "warrantless arrest".
