US brings Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador to face criminal charges

The case over Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation became a flashpoint in the debate over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

The Trump administration has brought a man wrongly deported to El Salvador back to the US, where he faces federal criminal charges of unlawfully transporting unauthorised immigrants, according to newly unsealed court documents.

The decision to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the US is a reversal for the Trump administration, as top officials had repeatedly dismissed the idea that he would ever return to the country.

The El Salvador native, who had been living in Maryland, was among a group of migrants sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison in March, despite an earlier order prohibiting him from being sent back to his home country.

A Maryland federal judge in April ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return, but officials had said they were unable to immediately do so because he was in the custody of a foreign government.

The indictment prompted the resignation of at least one veteran career prosecutor who headed the criminal division at the US attorney’s office in Nashville, Tenn., where the case was filed, people familiar with the matter said.

Attorney-General Pam Bondi speaks as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche listens during a news conference about Kilmar Abrego Garcia at the Justice Department in Washington. Picture: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

Officials said Friday that they would seek to hold Abrego Garcia in custody, without bail, while the case is pending, according to court filings.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi said he had landed in the US on Friday, and that El Salvador had agreed to return him to the country to “face these very serious charges”.

“This is what American justice looks like,” Bondi said. If he is convicted, he will serve his sentence in the US, and then likely be sent back to El Salvador, she said.

An attorney for Abrego Garcia, Andrew Rossman of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, said: “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. It’s now up to our judicial system to see that Mr Abrego Garcia receives the due process that the Constitution guarantees to all persons.”

An undated photo of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Picture: Murray Osorio PLLC via AP

In a May 21 indictment that was unsealed Friday in Tennessee federal court, prosecutors accused Abrego Garcia of being involved in a decade-long scheme to bring undocumented migrants into the US from countries such as El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras. Prosecutors alleged in the 10-page indictment that Abrego Garcia belonged to the MS-13 gang – a claim his family has denied – and that some of the migrants he transported were also members or associates of the gang.

Prosecutors said Abrego Garcia and one of his alleged co-conspirators would often pick up migrants in the Houston area shortly after they had crossed the US-Mexico border. The alleged co-conspirators would then transport the migrants to other parts of the country. Abrego Garcia occasionally also transported firearms illegally purchased in Texas for resale in Maryland, the indictment said.

Prosecutors said an investigation of traffic camera images, cellphone data and financial records tied Abrego Garcia to the alleged smuggling ring.

During a press conference on Friday, Bondi said Abrego Garcia belonged to the same smuggling ring that was involved in the transport of more than 150 migrants in a tractor-trailer that overturned in Mexico, resulting in more than 50 deaths.

Abrego Garcia’s case has become a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation push. A number of Democratic lawmakers travelled to El Salvador in recent months to call for his release, including Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen who was able to meet with him in April.

US Senator Chris Van Hollen, left, shaking hands with Kilmar Abrego Garcia in San Salvador on April 17, 2025. Picture: X account of El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele / AFP

He was sent with a group of hundreds of alleged gang members to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as Cecot, in March. Administration officials at first acknowledged his deportation was an error. They later said that he is a member of MS-13.

The administration has been in a standoff with the courts over Abrego Garcia’s case after the US Supreme Court in April directed the government to comply with the lower court’s order to seek his return. On Friday, lawyers for the government asked the Maryland federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit seeking his return now that he is back in the US

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally, said in a post Friday on X: “We work with the Trump administration, and if they request the return of a gang member to face charges, of course we wouldn’t refuse.”

Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, left of the speaker and wearing black, participated in a May demonstration in his support. Picture: Carol Guzy/Zuma Press

Abrego Garcia entered the US illegally as a teenager. He was arrested in 2019 on suspicion of being a gang member. He spent months in immigration custody before a judge ruled he couldn’t be deported to his home country, citing the threat of gang violence to his family.

The Tennessee Highway Patrol in May released video of a November 2022 traffic stop that was cited in the indictment. At the time, Abrego Garcia was pulled over for speeding while driving with eight other individuals on a Tennessee interstate. He said he was driving fellow construction workers. He wasn’t charged at the time.

“You got a bunch of people in here, don’t you,” the trooper asked, in footage of the stop captured on video reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Abrego Garcia paused, looked behind him, then quipped, “One per seat.”

At one point a second trooper told the first he believed Abrego Garcia was trafficking the people in the car. “You know what you got here, right,” he asked. “He’s hauling these people for money.”

On Friday, Bondi said the grand jury that indicted Abrego Garcia found that he has “played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring. They found this was his full time job, not a contractor. He was a smuggler of humans and children and women.”

US officials didn’t take him into custody after the 2022 traffic stop. Asked what facts had changed since then, Bondi said: “What has changed is that Donald Trump is now president of the United States.”

Dow Jones Newswires