WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors are asking a court to restore criminal human smuggling charges against a Salvadoran man who was wrongfully deported by the Trump administration.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed an appeal on Monday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. Government lawyers want judges to throw out a lower court ruling that dismissed the case. A Tennessee judge ruled in May that prosecutors charged Kilmar Abrego Garcia as punishment for fighting his illegal removal to El Salvador.
Justice Department officials insist that retaliation played no role in their choice to charge Abrego Garcia. They claim they had “multiple legitimate bases to prosecute” him.
”The decision to seek an indictment against Abrego Garcia for human smuggling was made by career prosecutors based on the evidence, the law, and their firm belief that there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Abrego Garcia had committed the offenses charged,” the Justice Department said in a news release.
Federal attorneys warned that the May dismissal “marks a dramatic expansion of the power of courts to dismiss serious criminal charges based on subjective assessments of a prosecutor’s motivations.”
Lawyers for Abrego Garcia immediately rejected the government’s stance. They noted that the prosecution targeted him only after he took his case to the highest court in the nation.
In a statement, Abrego Garcia’s defense team called the Justice Department’s news release “flat wrong,” saying that “the indictment and prosecution of Abrego Garcia was, in fact, vindictive; the evidence before the district court established just that; and the proof was clear notwithstanding the DOJ’s refusal to call the actual decision makers, including AG [Todd] Blanche, to testify under oath.”
”This case was initiated vindictively and on instructions from the White House after our client successfully won his Supreme Court case,” his defense team added.
The human smuggling charges stem from a November 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee. State Highway Patrol officers pulled Abrego Garcia over and found several people inside his vehicle. Federal prosecutors indicted him last year on two counts of human smuggling, and he pleaded not guilty.
At the same time, Abrego Garcia is fighting the administration in a separate Maryland federal court. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to deport him to Liberia, an African nation. A federal judge has temporarily blocked that deportation attempt.
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