Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose deportation to El Salvador became a political flashpoint, was returned on Friday to the United States, where he faces criminal charges in Tennessee for unlawfully transporting illegal aliens.
Garcia, who had been living in Maryland at the time of his arrest, was sent to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists and gang members in March.
The Supreme Court in April mandated that the administration “facilitate” Garcia’s release and return to the United States, but White House officials insisted he was never coming back. “There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said last month during a Senate hearing.
The Trump administration says Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error.” In 2019, an immigration judge had granted Garcia a “withholding of removal status” preventing his deportation on grounds that he faced threats to his safety from gang violence in El Salvador, his home country. Garcia illegally immigrated to the United States in 2011.
Democrats have questioned the Trump administration’s claim that Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang and depicted him as a hardworking “Maryland Man.” Attorney General Pam Bondi, after Garcia landed back in the U.S., addressed the development in a press conference, saying he was “a smuggler of humans, and children, and women.”
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