Kilmar Abrego Garcia appeared in a Tennessee federal court on Friday and pleaded not guilty to human smuggling charges. On June 6th, Attorney General Pam Bondi had announced that Garcia, who had previously been summarily deported to the notorious CECOT prison in his native El Salvador on March 15th by the Trump administration, was being returned to the United States to face the indictment, which hinges on a 2022 traffic stop in which Garcia was driving a vehicle with nine passengers. His lawyers have called the charges “preposterous.”
Garcia, 29, had been living in the United States for more than a decade, with a judge blocking his deportation case in 2019 while his asylum case was being heard. His wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who is the mother of their son, Kilmar Jr., insists that he is just a construction worker.
Garcia told officers during the traffic stop that he had been traveling with the passengers from Maryland to St Louis, Missouri and back for construction work, although license plate data reveals that the car Garcia was driving had not been in St Louis in at least a year. Instead, it had recently been in Houston, Texas.
The White House claimed that Garcia was an MS-13 gang member despite him never having been charged with or arrested for a gang-related crime. Adding to the controversy was the fact that the Trump administration had stated in court that Garcia had been deported by mistake, a claim they walked back a short while later.
While federal prosecutors have claimed in their indictment that Garcia had abused women and trafficked drugs during his alleged smuggling runs, they have not levied any charges against him related to those claims. They are instead cited as reasons why Garcia should be kept in jail until trial, while his defense attorneys say that the Trump administration’s mistake in deporting him and “basic fairness” dictate that he should remain free.
A federal judge in Maryland had ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Garcia’s return from CECOT, and the Supreme Court reaffirmed the order on April 10th, stating that the White House had an obligation to “facilitate” his return. The Trump administration appeared not to comply with the order, with many legal experts commenting that President Trump’s refusal to comply with the Supreme Court’s order amounted to a constitutional crisis.
