A wrongly deported immigrant at the center of a high-profile legal battle over President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort is back in the United States and facing a criminal indictment in Tennessee, the Justice Department said Friday. Attorney General Pam Bondi held a news conference to unveil the indictment for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident who is originally from El Salvador, on two charges alleging he took part in a conspiracy between 2016 to 2025 to transport undocumented immigrants from Texas to Maryland and other places in the United States. Abrego Garcia had been held in an El Salvador prison since March, when the Trump administration sent him to Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT. An immigration judge in 2019 ordered that Abrego Garcia not be deported to El Salvador because of possible persecution. The Trump administration acknowledged that his deportation was an “administrative error.” His deportation saga included a Supreme Court ruling in April that the Trump administration should facilitate his return, and visits from Democratic members of Congress as the Trump administration said it did not have the power to return him to the United States. The criminal indictment was filed May 21, but it was not unsealed until Abrego Garcia was returned to the United States on Friday after an arrest warrant was shown to the government in El Salvador, according to the Justice Department. Bondi said a grand jury investigation uncovered that Abrego Garcia was allegedly part of a smuggling ring and made more than 100 trips to transport people, firearms and drugs. “They found this was his full-time job, not a contractor. He was a smuggler of humans and children and women,” Bondi said. The indictment highlighted a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, where Abrego Garcia was indicted, in which Abrego Garcia was driving a modified SUV with nine passengers who were undocumented immigrants. The indictment alleged that Abrego Garcia and others lied to a law enforcement officer about their reason for the trip when they said they were traveling from St. Louis to Maryland for construction work. Bondi told reporters that “recently found facts” drove the investigation into Abrego Garcia. “Thanks to the bright light that has been shined on Abrego Garcia, this investigation continued with actually amazing police work, and we were able to track this case and stop this international smuggling ring from continuing,” Bondi said. The indictment alleged that other co-conspirators would ferry undocumented immigrants across the border with Mexico and Abrego Garcia would transport them through the United States, a violation of federal law. The monthslong saga started when Abrego Garcia’s family sued the Trump administration over his deportation, which was in violation of an immigration judge’s order preventing his deportation to El Salvador. Judge Paula Xinis for the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland ordered the administration to return Abrego Garcia to the United States in April. Abrego Garcia’s plight became a proxy political battle over Trump’s effort to increase deportations and struggles against the limits placed on him by the courts. In April, Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador and met with Abrego Garcia to highlight his incarceration there. Van Hollen and other Democrats argued that Trump had defied court orders by sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador and keeping him there when the administration had a contract with the Salvadoran government to hold migrants there. Meanwhile, Republicans alleged that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13 — Trump himself touted a digitally altered picture of Abrego Garcia’s knuckles during an Oval Office interview — and argued that Democrats had sided with lawbreakers. The administration had also publicly resisted efforts to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. At a hearing last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that “there is no scenario” in which Abrego Garcia is returned to the United States.
