DOJ Brings Kilmar Abrego Garcia Back to the U.S. After Insisting It Couldn’t
Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned to the U.S. to appear in court on Friday, more than two months after being deported to a prison in El Salvador, the country of his birth. No matter how the trial shakes out, it’s just the latest example of the Trump administration playing fast and loose with both the facts and the law.
Abrego Garcia was charged with two federal counts of trafficking. The grand jury indictment says Abrego Garcia “was a member and associate of the transnational criminal organization…MS-13” and conspired to transport “undocumented aliens and narcotics” and “firearms” into and across the U.S.
These claims seem to stem from a 2022 traffic stop when the Tennessee Highway Patrol stopped Abrego Garcia for speeding while driving a vehicle with multiple passengers. At the time, he told police they were coming from St. Louis, where they had been working in construction; he was not detained.
The indictment says data from license plate readers showed the vehicle “had not been near St. Louis in the past twelve months and, in fact, had been in the Houston, Texas area.”
“Unfortunately, Kilmar is currently imprisoned without contact with the outside world, which means he cannot respond to the claims,” Abrego Garcia’s wife said in April, when details of the traffic stop were made public.
Indeed, a court of law is the best place to adjudicate those claims, but there is evidence that the government may have cooked up the charges in order to retroactively justify the case: On May 21, the same day the grand jury returned the indictment, Ben Schrader, head of the Nashville U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Criminal Division, resigned. Sources told ABC News it was “prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons.”
The case has been controversial from the start: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Abrego Garcia on March 12; three days later he was deported to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), an overcrowded Salvadoran maximum security prison whose
Article from Reason.com
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