Kilmar Abrego Garcia Returned to the US

ABC New Reports: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, newly returned to US, appears in court on charges of trafficking migrants.

Mistakenly deported Salvadoran native Kilmar Abrego Garcia appeared in a Tennessee courtroom Friday, hours after he was brought back to the United States to face criminal charges for allegedly transporting undocumented migrants within the U.S.

More than two months after the Trump administration admitted it mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia from Maryland to his native El Salvador, a two-count indictment unsealed Friday alleges that he participated in a yearslong conspiracy to haul undocumented migrants from Texas to the interior of the country.

The first thing to note is that the Trump administration claimed it was impossible to get Abrego Garcia back (alongside the obviously false claim by President Bukele of El Salvador that he couldn’t send him back). But look! Here he is.

The second thing to note is that those of us calling for his return were concerned with the lack of due process, seeing as how he, and many others, were deported without their cases being adjudicated. So, they have found something to charge him with.

He made his initial court appearance Friday evening in the Middle District of Tennessee, answering “Yes, I understand” in Spanish when U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes asked him if he understood the charges against him.

Judge Homes set a hearing for June 13, where Abrego Garcia will be arraigned on charges and the judge will take up the government’s motion to hold him in pre-trial detention on the grounds that he “poses a danger to the community and a serious risk of flight” He will remain in federal custody in Tennessee pending next week’s hearing.

“If convicted at trial, the defendant faces a maximum punishment of 10 years’ imprisonment for ‘each alien’ he transported,” said the government’s motion for detention, which also contained an allegation — not included in the indictment — that one of Abrego Garcia’s co-conspirators told authorities that Abrego Garcia participated in the murder of a rival gang member’s mother in El Salvador.

And yes, I said “found.”

This is not to say that the charges are false, as I have no way of knowing their validity. What I do know is that there was nary a peep about these allegations. As such, it seems more than likely that they have been looking for something to charge him with before bringing him back to the US. The narrative of the dangers of immigrants must not be failed. Certainly, the MAGA faithful need something to use to dismiss the concerns of those who insist on due process and humane treatment of immigrants.

To remind everyone, the previous “evidence” against Abrego Garcia was 1) testimony from an informant in New York that Garcia Abrego was in MS-13, and 2) the assertion that tattoos on his fingers were symbols that spelled out MS-13.

There was no mention of the charges that have now been filed. Note that the indictment was issued in Tennessee, not New York.

The ABC News story also includes the following:

The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News. Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.

Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.

Does this prove anything? Clearly not. Does it raise red flags in a situation that already has several crimson banners flapping in the breeze? Yes. Yes, it does.

I am not surprised that a returned Abrego Garcia is facing a trial upon his return. I expected that to be the likeliest of outcomes. But it is telling that the charges he is facing have only materialized after Bondi’s DoJ has had a few months to find them.

CNN has a more detailed account here: Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been returned to the United States to face criminal charges.

Let me conclude with a reminder that most of the persons rendered to CECOT did not have criminal records (not that sending convicted criminals to a gulag is defensible). As the Texas Tribune recently reported, Trump administration knew most Venezuelans deported from Texas to a Salvadoran prison had no U.S. convictions.

The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United States before it labeled them as terrorists and deported them, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data that has not been previously reported.

[…]

The data indicates that the government knew that only six of the immigrants were convicted of violent crimes: four for assault, one for kidnapping and one for a weapons offense. And it shows that officials were aware that more than half, or 130, of the deportees were not labeled as having any criminal convictions or pending charges; they were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.

As for foreign offenses, our own review of court and police records from around the United States and in Latin American countries where the deportees had lived found evidence of arrests or convictions for 20 of the 238 men. Of those, 11 involved violent crimes such as armed robbery, assault or murder, including one man who the Chilean government had asked the U.S. to extradite to face kidnapping and drug charges there. Another four had been accused of illegal gun possession.

We conducted a case-by-case review of all the Venezuelan deportees. It’s possible there are crimes and other information in the deportees’ backgrounds that did not show up in our reporting or the internal government data, which includes only minimal details for nine of the men. There’s no single publicly available database for all crimes committed in the U.S., much less abroad. But everything we did find in public records contradicted the Trump administration’s assertions as well.

The evidence, therefore, hardly suggests that these were the “worst of the worst” as Trump likes to claim.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in response to our findings that “ProPublica should be embarrassed that they are doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens who are a threat,” adding that “the American people strongly support” the president’s immigration agenda.

When asked about the differences between the administration’s public statements about the deportees and the way they are labeled in government data, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin largely repeated previous public statements. She insisted, without providing evidence, that the deportees were dangerous, saying, “These individuals categorized as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gang members and more — they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”

I will conclude by noting the grim irony of an official spokesperson of the US government asserting that they are punishing “human rights abusers” without evidence or due process, while that punishment is a clear human rights abuse being perpetrated with glee by the sitting administration.