Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whose erroneous deportation to El Salvador became a protracted battle over due process and a test of wills, was returned to the United States to face human smuggling charges in Tennessee and appeared in federal court Friday.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday in a news conference that he had landed in the U.S. “to face justice.”
Abrego Garcia, 29, has been named in an indictment charging him with transporting within the U.S. people not legally in the country. The two-count indictment, sealed by a Tennessee court last month, alleges that Abrego Garcia participated in a conspiracy over nine years to move people from Texas deeper into the country.
The indictment alleges that those transported included members of the MS-13 gang and that he worked with co-conspirators.
Wearing a beige button-down shirt, jeans and hiking boots, Abrego Garcia was asked Friday afternoon by a federal judge in Nashville if he understood the issues and and he answered “Yes, I understand” through an interpreter.
An arraignment and detention hearing is scheduled for June 13. Abrego Garcia remains in federal custody. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes declined his public defender’s request that he be freed immediately.
Prosecutors have argued that he should be detained, and they say he is a flight risk. In a detention memo, they said that testimony at trial will show he transported “approximately 50 undocumented aliens throughout the United States per month for several years.”
Prosecutors added that he faces a maximum of 10 years imprisonment for “each alien” he has transported, which they say is effectively a life sentence.
The Justice Department said that Abrego Garcia used his status in MS-13 to “further his criminal activity.” President Donald Trump said to reporters Friday that he never should have been returned and pointed to the grand jury findings.
“This was his full-time job, not a contractor,” Bondi said. “He was a smuggler of humans and children and women. He made over 100 trips, the grand jury found, smuggling people throughout our country.”
Abrego Garcia’s attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, said bringing him back for prosecution “is an abuse of power, not justice.”
“The government disappeared Kilmar to a foreign prison in violation of a court order,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said in a statement. “Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him. This shows that they were playing games with the court all along. Due process means the chance to defend yourself before you’re punished, not after.”
The indictment alleges that from about 2016 to 2025, Abrego Garcia and others conspired to bring migrants illegally to the United States from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador and elsewhere, through Mexico and across the Texas-Mexico border.
Abrego Garcia and a co-conspirator “ordinarily picked up the undocumented aliens in Houston, Texas area” after they had crossed the border. The pair then allegedly would transport “the undocumented aliens from Texas to other parts of the United States to further the aliens’ unlawful presence in the United States,” the indictment said.
In the indictment, the government said Abrego Garcia and six other uncharged and unnamed co-conspirators communicated using cellphones and social media to unlawfully transport the undocumented immigrants.
They allege that Abrego Garcia would hold the cellphones of those he was transporting within the U.S. and would return them at the end of their trip, “they did this to ensure the undocumented aliens could not and would not contact anyone else during the trip,” the government said in the indictment.
The indictment also claims Abrego Garcia and other conspirators would reconfigure vehicles to transport the immigrants and that children would travel on floorboards. On one occasion, the Tennessee Highway Patrol stopped Abrego Garcia while he was driving a Suburban with “an after-market third row of seats placed where a cargo area should be, which was occupied by undocumented passengers.”
The government further alleged that Abrego Garcia and co-conspirators collected financial payments from the immigrants and transferred money between one another to conceal the origin of the payments. The indictment claimed that he was involved in the transport of 150 migrants in a tractor trailer that overturned in Mexico, killing 50 and injuring others.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, where Abrego Garcia was a resident, pointed out that he was deported on March 15 and said that it was “about time” he was returned.
“They obviously want to make this about whether or not he ends up being a good guy or a bad guy, but it’s not a moral question,” Raskin, a Democrat, told CNN. “It’s a legal question. It’s a constitutional question of whether the government can pick people up and take them out of country.”
Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, has insisted that he was not involved in criminal activity.
“Kilmar worked in construction and sometimes transported groups of workers between job sites, so it’s entirely plausible he would have been pulled over while driving with others in the vehicle,” his wife previously said in a statement. “He was not charged with any crime or cited for any wrongdoing” at the time.
The family’s attorney, Chris Newman, said Friday that the Trump administration for months engaged in “a campaign of disinformation, defamation against Kilmar and his family.”
“Kilmar will finally get his day in court,” Newman said.
The Trump administration has released various allegations against Abrego Garcia over time to support its deportation of him and in response to court demands. Abrego Garcia was on his way home from a job in Baltimore with his child in the car when he was pulled over on March 12. He was detained in several different facilities.
A federal judge and the U.S. Supreme Court in April ordered the federal government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., but the administration dragged its feet and resisted. At times, the administration insisted that his return was up to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who, after refusing to send him back wrote on X Friday that “of course we wouldn’t refuse” the request of the Trump administration.
Bondi said the U.S. presented an arrest warrant to El Salvador, and “they agreed to send him back.”
The Trump administration previously agreed to pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison about 300 people it alleged were members of the Tren de Aragua gang for one year.
U.S. officials accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 and gave that as reason to deport him, despite a judge’s order from 2019 barring him from being sent to his home country.
He was taken to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, known for its harsh and brutal conditions. Government attorneys had said he was taken there as a result of “administrative error.”
Abrego Garcia’s wife said she did not know he was in the El Salvador prison until she recognized him in a video that Bukele posted of detainees taken from a plane.
The Supreme Court ruled in April that Abrego Garcia’s removal was “illegal” and determined that a judge’s order for the administration to facilitate his return was proper.
As calls for his return intensified, the administration doubled down on keeping him incarcerated in El Salvador.
Despite orders to bring him back, the administration stood its ground repeatedly, raising concerns about its defiance of the judicial branch and setting off threats of contempt from the bench.
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration just last week to give hundreds of migrants in El Salvador’s CECOT prison the chance to challenge their detentions and removals.
Newman, the Abrego Garcia family attorney, expressed doubts about the charges.
“We’ve been concerned for some time that either the Trump administration or the Bukele administration would gin up charges against him to kind of backfill the violation of rights, that are demonstrable, that they’ve engaged in,” he said.
