(NewsNation) — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was deported to El Salvador due to an administrative error, has returned to the United States to face federal charges, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Friday.
He faces two counts of unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain, and a third count for conspiracy. The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee in which Abrego Garcia was pulled over by state troopers and found to be in the vehicle with a number of other people traveling to Maryland.
In a news conference on Friday, Bondi alleged Abrego Garcia is a trafficker of men, women and children. She said that U.S. officials presented El Salvador government officials with an arrest warrant for Abrego Garcia, and they agreed to release him.
“Abrego Garcia is a danger to our community,” Bondi told reporters, adding, “This is what American justice looks like.”
Kilmar Abrego Garcia accused of trafficking, MS-13 ties
Abrego Garcia’s wife and his attorneys have denied that he was involved in human trafficking. They have also denied that he belongs to the MS-13 gang, as Trump administration officials have maintained.
MS-13 was designated as a foreign terrorist organization as part of an executive order Trump signed shortly after taking office in January.
El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, wrote on social media Friday that, as he pledged to President Donald Trump in a White House meeting, he would never smuggle a terrorist into the United States or release a gang member into the streets of his country.
But Bukele added that if the United States requested the return of a gang member to face charges, “of course we wouldn’t refuse,” he wrote on X.
His legal team has also accused the government of stonewalling Abrego Garcia’s case by failing to provide substantive information about what steps were being made to return him to the United States per a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
In a statement obtained by NewsNation on Friday. U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, said that the Trump administration “appears to have finally relented” to demands for compliance with the Supreme Court’s order to begin working toward returning Abrego Garcia to the United States.
Van Hollen alleged in his statement that the Trump administration “flouted the Supreme Court and the Constitution.”
“As I have repeatedly said, this is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights – and the rights of all,” Van Hollen, who was among Democratic lawmakers to travel to El Salvador and who met with Abrego Garcia in prison, said. “The Administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”
Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador prison
Abrego Garcia was deported in March and has since remained at the center of a contentious legal fight between the Trump administration and those advocating that he was wrongfully deported to his home
country.
This week, a federal judge ordered the unsealing of several court documents in the lawsuit over Abrego Garcia’s deportation. The Trump administration argued that unsealing the documents would be a threat to national security.
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have argued that the Trump administration has done nothing to bring Abrego
Garcia back to the United States. They say the government is invoking the privilege to hide behind the misconduct of mistakenly deporting him and refusing to bring him back.
In a statement published on X on Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote, “The United States of America confronts Kilmar Abrego Garcia with overwhelming evidence— he is being indicted by a grand jury for human smuggling, including children, and conspiracy. Justice awaits this Salvadoran man.”
Abrego Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador who entered the United States illegally. He has been living in Maryland with his U.S.-born wife and son after being provided protected legal status and legal work authorization in 2019. The protected status was granted after an immigration judge agreed with Abrego Garcia that his life was in danger if he was sent back to El Salvador.
Abrego Garcia was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on March 12 and questioned about his MS-13 affiliation. He was deported on March 15 on one of three flights to El Salvador that included alleged Venezuelan gang members.
The Justice Department argued on April 7 that although Abrego Garcia was deported through an “administrative error,” his removal from the U.S. was not an error. The error, department attorneys wrote, was in having him deported specifically to El Salvador even though he had been protected from deportation through the 2019 order.
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