After a pair of federal judges in Tennessee had cleared the way for Kilmar Ábrego García to be released from pretrial detention, on August 22nd, so that he could spend a couple of days with his family before a scheduled check-in at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Baltimore, he was taken directly to a nearby hotel. The first thing he did was change into a new set of clothes that his wife, Jennifer Vasquez, had bought for him. Then he was given some flowers and ushered into a small room where Vasquez, their three children, other relatives, and supporters were waiting. He picked up his youngest son as people chanted, “¡Sí, se pudo!”—something like “Yes, we did!”
The child had been in a car with Ábrego García when ICE arrested him, near their home in Maryland, on March 12th. The arrest occurred during the government’s scramble to fly hundreds of people—mostly Venezuelans it claimed were members of the Tren de Aragua gang—to be incarcerated in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, under the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act. (A federal appeals court in New Orleans has since ruled that President Donald Trump had improperly invoked the law.) Days later, Ábrego García, a Salvadoran native, was sent to CECOT on a plane with some of them, beginning one of the highest-profile campaigns of retribution against an individual person of Trump’s second term.
On March 24th, lawyers for Ábrego García and his family filed a civil lawsuit demanding his return, and the courts quickly ruled that he had been deported in error. His entanglement with ICE had begun six years earlier, in March, 2019, when the Prince George’s County police department, in Maryland, arrested him and three other day laborers outside a Home Depot. (More recently, he has been employed as a sheet-metal worker.) He sought asylum and the right to not be refouled, or forcibly returned to a place where one is subject to persecution—in his case, to El Salvador. An immigration judge in Baltimore denied him the asylum request but granted him the latter, in a “withholding of removal,” which allowed him to work in the U.S. without risk of being sent back to his home country. The judge found that he had a “well-founded fear” of persecution there, on account of official corruption and a history of extortionist demands and death threats from a local gang, against both him and his family, who ran a pupusa business.
Eduardo Zelaya, a Salvadoran organizer with CASA—one of the immigrants’-rights organizations that, alongside a team of immigration lawyers, has been advocating for Ábrego García’s freedom since March—was with him in Tennessee. “Seeing the family reunified felt like a victory,” he told me in Spanish. “But, at the same time, it felt like the beginning of a battle.”
That battle had started during the effort to secure his release. Ábrego García had finally been returned from El Salvador on June 6th—but to Tennessee, not to Maryland, and only once the government had filed a new set of charges, in an indictment, accusing him of unlawfully transporting undocumented immigrants across state lines. The federal magistrate judge in Tennessee handling pretrial matters in the new case, Barbara Holmes, finding that he posed no risk of flight or danger to other people, had ordered him released on June 22nd to await trial. But that release was delayed for two months, as officials, in public and before judges in Maryland and Tennessee, offered shifting explanations as to the government’s intentions with the indictment. Did the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security want Ábrego García to face, as Attorney General Pam Bondi has put it, “American justice”? If so, he’s presumed innocent until proved otherwise, in a criminal court of law. Or did they want him to face the deportation system right away, and remove him to a country other than El Salvador under the immigration laws? If so, there would be a process for that in immigration court. What the government could not pursue is both courses at once.
Faced with this legal reality, on the night of Thursday, August 21st, hours before Ábrego García was to be released, ICE devised a choice for him. He could agree to delay his release until the following Monday, and then be deported to Costa Rica, whose government had just committed to granting him refugee status or residency—in exchange for pleading guilty to the federal indictment in Tennessee. Or, he could be released as planned, decline the plea offer, report to his scheduled appointment at the ICE field office in Baltimore, and risk being deported this time, inexplicably, to Uganda, if he chose to await trial. His criminal-defense team in Tennessee, which is seeking to have the indictment thrown out as a “vindictive and selective prosecution,” immediately brought this development to the attention of Waverly Crenshaw, the U.S. district judge overseeing the prosecution, stating, “There can be only one interpretation of these events: the DOJ, DHS, and ICE are using their collective powers to force Mr. Abrego to choose between a guilty plea followed by relative safety, or rendition to Uganda, where his safety and liberty would be under threat.” (The government has since said that it plans to deport him instead to Eswatini; on Thursday, Reuters reported that the African nation had no knowledge of this arrangement.)
Ábrego García preferred to be released as scheduled, and, when he arrived for his ICE appointment in Baltimore, hundreds of supporters were waiting outside, including members of Congress, state and local officials, and faith leaders. “When he goes in that building, we’ll be supporting him. We continue to fight. No matter what happens in there today, we got his back,” Representative Glenn Ivey, of Maryland, said. Ábrego García read a prepared statement, in Spanish. “I want you to always remember that today I can say with pride that I am free and reunited with my family,” he said. Moments with his loved ones had given him the “strength and hope to continue this fight.” Speaking of others who have been detained under the Trump Administration, he said, “God is with us. He will never leave us. He will bring justice to all the injustice they’ve done.”
Ábrego García and Vasquez, his wife, entered the building. Less than an hour later, she emerged alone, and Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Ábrego García’s lead immigration lawyer, told the crowd that his client had been arrested again. The legal team shortly filed a petition for habeas corpus in Maryland. This was the fourth legal action between Ábrego García and the U.S. government since 2019, but this new case is different, in that it challenges what supporters describe as the political nature of Ábrego García’s rearrest. “The fact that they’re holding Costa Rica as a carrot and using Uganda as a stick to try to coerce him to plead guilty to a crime is such clear evidence that they’re weaponizing the immigration system in a manner that is completely unconstitutional,” Sandoval-Moshenberg announced to the crowd. At a hearing later in the week, he stated that Ábrego García would again seek asylum in the U.S. Paula Xinis, the U.S. district judge in Maryland who had been handling Ábrego García’s earlier civil case, returning him from El Salvador, is also handling the new case, and she has prevented the government from taking any action against him until she rules in the dispute, after a hearing scheduled for October 6th.
Senator Chris Van Hollen, of Maryland, who met with Ábrego García in El Salvador in April, told me that “his case reflects a corruption of the legal process from start to finish.” The D.H.S. posted a short clip, on X, of Ábrego García after his arrest at the ICE office, being led away in handcuffs and leg-irons. It was picked up by Fox News and other outlets, creating a viral moment of sorts, on account of two words that Ábrego García had said, looking into the camera: “Gobierno corrupto.”
Ábrego García wasn’t previously on any of Donald Trump’s enemies’ lists, but he landed there when he began winning his cases with the federal judiciary. Critical to those wins was the government’s admission of error in the civil suit he filed in March. Erez Reuveni, a veteran lawyer with the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, was fired after stating during a hearing that Ábrego García should not have been sent to El Salvador; he later became a whistle-blower. Another government official, Robert Cerna, in a separate court filing, wrote that the wrongful refoulement was the result of an “administrative error.”
Based on that information, on April 4th, Judge Xinis ordered the government to take steps to return Ábrego García to the U.S. The Administration challenged her ruling, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld it. So did the Supreme Court, on April 10th, issuing a unanimous, unsigned order that “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”
The Administration, however, stonewalled. Four days after the Supreme Court ruling, at an Oval Office meeting between Trump and the Salvadoran President, Nayib Bukele, a reporter asked, “President Trump, do you plan to ask President Bukele to help return the man who your Administration says was mistakenly deported?” Attorney General Pam Bondi answered for Trump: “If they wanted to return him, we would facilitate it—meaning provide a plane.” The White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller soon suggested that the Supreme Court had actually ruled in the Administration’s favor. Then he added, “That is the President of El Salvador. Your questions about it, per the Court, can only be directed to him.” A confused-looking Bukele replied, “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”
Judge Xinis and the Fourth Circuit both expressed dismay at the Administration’s failure to comply. “Defendants appear to have done nothing,” she wrote in a follow-up order, which allowed Ábrego García’s legal team to seek basic information about his status and whereabouts. The U.S. circuit judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, noted Bukele’s and Trump’s denials of responsibility. “We are told that neither government has the power to act,” he wrote. “The result will be to leave matters generally and Abrego Garcia specifically in an interminable limbo without recourse to law of any sort.”
This months-long standoff has allowed the Administration to escalate its campaign against Ábrego García in the press and on social media. The President displayed a digitally altered photo of tattoos that Ábrego García has on one hand, with the characters “MS-13” superimposed on his knuckles. After his rearrest, Bondi said, “He will no longer terrorize our country.” In August, Ábrego García’s criminal-defense team asked Judge Crenshaw to issue a gag order against Bondi and Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, stating that “the government’s ongoing barrage of prejudicial statements severely threaten—and perhaps have already irrevocably impaired—the ability to try this case at all—in any venue.”
Members of the Administration have also attacked Ábrego García based on allegations from various court records and his immigration file. The most sensitive—which they have made repeatedly—is that Ábrego García is a “wife beater.” In April, the D.H.S. released records from Prince George’s County showing that Vasquez had sought temporary court intervention, in 2020 and 2021, after accusing her husband of violence against her; she withdrew one request and didn’t pursue the other. (They married while he was in detention in 2019; she testified on his behalf while pregnant with their son.) In May, Vasquez, who is a U.S. citizen, said in a statement, “My husband was traumatized from the time he spent in ICE detention and we were in the throes of COVID. Like many couples, we were caring for our children with barely enough to get by. All of those factors contributed to the actions which caused me to seek the protective order.”
Vice-President J. D. Vance, meanwhile, posted on X that Ábrego García was a “convicted MS-13 gang member,” a claim immediately refuted by commenters pointing out that there had been no conviction, or even a criminal complaint. There was only a police report, from his original arrest in 2019, citing an informant and claiming that Ábrego García’s clothing—including a Chicago Bulls cap—signified gang membership. (He wore a Bulls cap at the reunion in Tennessee.) After the Supreme Court ruling, the Justice Department posted the police report. The New Republic and USA Today both noted that it had been written by a discredited Prince George’s County detective who was later criminally indicted for leaking “sensitive and confidential information about an ongoing police investigation with a commercial sex worker.” Judge Xinis, in one of her orders, noted that the Administration had provided no evidence of MS-13 or terrorist ties, which it has also repeatedly alleged.
A few days before Ábrego García’s release in Tennessee, in August, his defense team there asked Judge Crenshaw to dismiss the indictment because the government cannot retaliate against anyone merely for exercising their rights in court. “This case results from the government’s concerted effort to punish him for having the audacity to fight back, rather than accept a brutal injustice,” they wrote.
The indictment, which was kept under seal until Ábrego García’s return from El Salvador, implicates him in a criminal conspiracy in which he and others are said to have “knowingly and unlawfully transported thousands of undocumented aliens who had no authorization to be present in the United States, and many of whom were MS-13 members and associates.” It points to a single incident: on November 30, 2022, a Tennessee state trooper pulled over a Chevrolet S.U.V. driven by Ábrego García, for speeding. He was taking nine other passengers, all of whom were Hispanic men, to Maryland, but after a brief inspection he was let go without a traffic ticket. According to the indictment, he was acting in concert with six unnamed co-conspirators. Tennessee authorities have released video of the traffic stop and confirmed that the federal government declined to take action then, and his lawyers have compiled a list of similar prosecutions in the same jurisdiction where prosecutors did not wait more than two years before bringing an indictment.
The effort to prepare the case, in fact, was conducted with Joint Task Force Vulcan, a special Justice Department unit formed during Trump’s first term to build criminal cases against MS-13. When the indictment was made public, Bondi personally thanked the unit, some of whose members, the Times reported, had no idea who Ábrego García was until they were enlisted to build the case against him, on April 28th. Among the witnesses the government hopes to put on the stand, and who offered grand-jury testimony, is a man who has been deported five times, and who, for his coöperation on the case, has been granted early release from federal prison, where he was serving a thirty-month sentence for human smuggling; he has also been promised deferred action on deportation in exchange for testimony against Ábrego García, whom he claims to have worked with.
Around the time that Ábrego García was indicted, according to ABC News, Ben Schrader, the head of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee, resigned, reportedly because of the indictment’s politically motivated nature. Without addressing the circumstances of his resignation, Schrader wrote on LinkedIn that, at the Justice Department, “the only job description I’ve ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.”
The case has been instructive because the judges handling it, Holmes and Crenshaw, have begun to test some of the evidence the government has gathered so far. They haven’t shied away from examining the domestic-violence incidents or the uncorroborated claims of gang ties. When weighing whether to release Ábrego García ahead of trial, Judge Holmes acknowledged that his wife had twice sought orders of protection, but found that this alone did not make him a risk. “There is no evidence of any similar occurrences since 2021,” she wrote. “Nor any evidence that Ms. Vasquez is anything other than fully supportive of Abrego.” Holmes likewise discredited the MS-13 accusation, for which prosecutors relied on the testimony of coöperating witnesses who either contradicted one another or were otherwise unreliable. In July, Crenshaw, in a second ruling endorsing her findings, was emphatic: “At bottom, the Government fails to provide any evidence that there is something in Abrego’s history, or his exhibited characteristics, that warrants detention.” He did suggest that Ábrego García will soon be afforded what the Trump Administration has denied him so far: a full and fair trial where he can subject the witnesses against him “to a rigorous cross examination.”
This kind of scrutiny, which the Constitution demands, may be precisely why the government devised the Uganda option: by coercing Ábrego García to plead guilty, it might have avoided the burden of proving its case beyond a reasonable doubt, plus all the procedural safeguards that come with a public trial. That proof is what Senator Van Hollen wants to see from the Administration. “Shut up on social media,” he said. “Put up your evidence in court.” ♦
