(The Center Square) – Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being returned from a Salvadoran maximum security prison to the United States, where he will face criminal charges.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced late Friday afternoon that the suspected MS-13 gang member had been indicted by a grand jury in Tennessee on May 21, charging him with “alien smuggling” and “conspiracy to commit alien smuggling.”
“The grand jury found that over the past nine years Abrego Garcia 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,” Bondi said. “Upon completion of his sentence, we anticipate he will be returned to his home country of El Salvador.”
Bondi added that the grand jury found that he was involved in “over 100” operations smuggling “thousands of illegal aliens.”
Controversy has surrounded Abrego Garcia since March, when the Trump administration mistakenly deported him to El Salvador due to an administrative error. Prior to that, Abrego Garcia was living in Maryland and had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in MS-13 in 2019, after immigrating illegally to the United States as a teenager with his parents around 2011. Officials prepared to deport Abrego Garcia then, but an immigration judge granted him “withholding of removal,” believing his life would be in danger if he were returned to El Salvador.
But it was a later traffic stop in Tennessee that led to Abrego Garcia’s charges that were announced Friday. The Center Square previously reported that Garcia was stopped by Tennessee troopers for speeding in 2022. He was driving an SUV with eight passengers, and one of the officers believed that he was smuggling them, remarking that he was “hauling these people for money.”
Tennessee policed released a 2022 traffic stop video of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Officer on the scene: ‘He’s hauling these people for money…there’s eight people in the car.’
Despite these brush-ups with the law and his wife filing for a protection order against him in 2020, Abrego Garcia was never charged with anything in the U.S. until the freshly announced indictment.
A federal court judge in April issued an order saying the administration had to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., and the Supreme Court partially upheld that order days later, ordering the administration to “effectuate” his return. Despite acknowledging its error, the administration has refused – until Friday – to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, claiming it possessed ample evidence that he was a dangerous man and a “convicted member” of MS-13.
Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen visited Abrego Garcia in prison in El Salvador in April, and several other Democratic lawmakers also previously traveled there to advocate for his return, arguing that he was denied due process and the Trump administration was flouting judicial orders.
