WASHINGTON — Alleged MS-13 gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia should receive another court hearing, a federal judge ruled Friday, after the US Department of Justice likely engaged in a “vindictive” human trafficking prosecution in an effort to deport the Salvadoran national.
Nashville US District Judge Waverly Crenshaw ordered an additional hearing after determining a motion from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers presented “evidence of vindictiveness” in the DOJ’s decision to bring the deportee back from El Salvador to the US to face trafficking charges in June.
A Maryland federal judge had ordered Abrego Garcia’s return to the US after he was wrongfully deported to El Salvador on April 4, but DOJ attorneys in subsequent court filings argued they had complied with portions of the ruling upheld by the Supreme Court.
The timeline of the feds’ prosecution “suggests that Abrego’s prosecution may stem from retaliation by the DOJ and DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] due to Abrego’s successful challenge of his unlawful deportation in Maryland,” Crenshaw wrote in his 16-page order.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in particular “linked Abrego’s criminal charges to Abrego’s civil lawsuit in Maryland,” the judge noted, referencing a June 2025 interview on Fox News.
“Strikingly, during a television interview Deputy Attorney General Blanche revealed that the government started ‘investigating’ Abrego after ‘a judge in Maryland … questioned’ the government’s decision, found that it ‘had no right to deport him,’ and ‘accus[ed] [the government] of doing something wrong,’” he wrote.
“The Court holds that the totality of events creates a sufficient evidentiary basis to conclude that there is a ‘realistic likelihood of vindictiveness’ that entitles Abrego to discovery and requires an evidentiary hearing.”
A federal grand jury had indicted the 29-year-old in Tennessee on May 21 for participating in a conspiracy to shuttle illegal migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Ecuador through Mexico and into Texas.
From there, many were trafficked to Maryland, where Abrego Garcia resided until March of this year when he was wrongfully flown down to the Salvadoran mega-prison CECOT with other alleged gang members, as well as other states, according to the indictment.
During the first Trump administration, an immigration judge had given him a “withholding of removal” order that barred his return just to El Salvador, but not other countries, over concerns about persecution at the hands of a rival gang.
Abrego Garcia illegally entered the US in 2012 — and information provided by local law enforcement as well as other court records in Maryland, where he had been living since coming into the country, point to him being a member of MS-13, a rival to Salvadoran gang Barrio-18.
Jennifer Sura, his wife who is a US citizen, had also pleaded with a judge for protection from her husband for alleged domestic abuse. Both Abrego Garcia and his wife have denied he is an MS-13 member.
The case has ignited a firestorm of criticism against the Trump administration’s immigration policies and legal challenges in multiple jurisdictions, but a federal immigration judge on Thursday determined his final order of removal would stand, rejecting the most recent bid before Friday’s to reopen the deportation case.
That was the second ruling denying him asylum to remain in the US after the late 2019 decision, which also refused to grant him the legal status but gave him the “withholding of removal” order for El Salvador.
As the federal trafficking case ramped up, body-camera footage surfaced of Abrego Garcia being stopped in the state while driving seven other people — all without luggage — from Texas to Maryland. A state trooper can be heard in the video saying he “was hauling these people for money” and Abrego Garcia had $1,400 in cash on him.
He was released with a citation for an expired license and no charges at the time — more than 900 days later he was charged with human trafficking after being arrested in March 2025 in Baltimore, sent to two incarceration facilities in El Salvador and ultimately returned to the US.
Abrego Garcia is currently being held at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania.
