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Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported from Maryland to El Salvador by the Trump administration, has returned to the United States to face criminal charges of transporting illegal immigrants within the US, Attorney General Pam Bondi has said.
Abrego Garcia’s return marks a turning point in a case that became a broader symbol of criticisms of President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration policies.
Critics, including many congressional Democrats, pointed to the case as a sign that the administration was disregarding civil liberties in its push to step up deportations.
But the administration insisted that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang, an accusation that his lawyers denied.
On Saturday AEST, administration officials portrayed the indictment of Abrego Garcia by a grand jury in Tennessee as vindication of their approach — even though the charges were filed on 21 May, more than two months after Abrego Garcia’s 15 March deportation.
At a press conference, Bondi said Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele agreed to return Abrego Garcia to the US after US officials presented his government with an arrest warrant.
“The grand jury found that over the past nine years, Abrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring,” Bondi said in a press conference.
Abrego Garcia will have the chance to enter a plea in court and contest the charges at trial. If he is convicted, he would be deported to El Salvador after serving his sentence, Bondi said.
In a statement, Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, Andrew Rossman, said it would now be up to the US judicial system to ensure he received due process.
“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,” said Rossman, a partner at law firm Quinn Emanuel.
Who is Kilmar Abrego Garcia?
Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador, despite an immigration judge’s 2019 order granting him protection from deportation to El Salvador after finding he was likely to be persecuted by gangs if returned there, court records show.
After his lawyers challenged the basis for his deportation, the US Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, with liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor saying the government had cited no basis for what she called his “warrantless arrest”.
US District Judge Paula Xinis has opened a probe into what, if anything, the Trump administration had done to secure his return, after his lawyers accused officials of stonewalling their requests for information. That led to concerns among Trump’s critics that his administration would openly defy court orders.
Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator from Maryland who visited Abrego Garcia in El Salvador, said in a statement that the Trump administration has “finally relented to our demands for compliance with court orders and the due process rights afforded to everyone in the United States”.
“This is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights,” Van Hollen said. “The administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”
The indictment alleges that Abrego Garcia worked with at least five co-conspirators to bring immigrants to the US illegally, and then transport them from the border to other destinations in the country. Abrego Garcia often picked up migrants in Houston, and made more than 100 trips between Texas and Maryland between 2016 and 2025, the indictment said.
The indictment also charges Abrego Garcia and two unidentified co-conspirators with transporting firearms illegally purchased in Texas for resale in Maryland. Abrego Garcia also transported illegal narcotics purchased in Texas for resale in Maryland and was on some occasions accompanied on those trips by members and associates of MS-13, according to the indictment.
