Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a suspected MS-13 gang member who was deported to El Salvador after an administrative error, has returned to the U.S. to face criminal charges for allegedly transporting illegal immigrants within the U.S., Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday.
“Abrego Garcia has landed in the United States to face justice,” Bondi told reporters during a news conference that aired live on Newsmax and the Newsmax2 free online streaming platform. “On May 21, a grand jury in the middle district of Tennessee returned a sealed indictment, charging Abrego Garcia of alien smuggling and conspiracy to commit alien smuggling.
“We want to thank [El Salvador] President [Nayib] Bukele for agreeing to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. Our government presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant, and they agreed to return him to our country.”
If Abrego Garcia is convicted, Bondi said after his sentence is completed, “we anticipate he will be returned to his home country of El Salvador.”
The indictment alleged Abrego Garcia, 29, participated in a yearslong conspiracy to haul illegal immigrants, including suspected members of MS-13, from Texas to the interior of the country. The alleged conspiracy spanned nearly a decade and involved the domestic transport of thousands of noncitizens, including some children, from Mexico and Central America.
“They found 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 … MS-13 gang members, violent gang terrorist organization members throughout our country.
“Thousands of illegal aliens were smuggled. This is especially disturbing because Abrego Garcia is also alleged with transporting minor children. The defendant traded the innocence of minor children for profit.”
Bondi said the grand jury linked Abrego Garcia to the same smuggling ring in which at least 54 migrants died, and 100 others were injured in 2021 after a tractor trailer overturned in Mexico. She also accused him of trafficking firearms and narcotics throughout the country “on multiple occasions.”
Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native who had been living with his wife and children in Maryland, was deported in March to El Salvador’s CECOT maximum security prison, even though an immigration judge in 2019 barred his deportation to that country. Since Abrego Garcia was deported, the Trump administration has been locked in a standoff with federal courts, including the Supreme Court, over orders for the government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador.
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys told The New York Times they welcomed their day in court and noted the government’s decision to return him to the U.S. undercut its longstanding efforts to keep him in El Salvador.
“Today’s action proves what we’ve known all along — that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so,” said Andrew Rossman, an attorney for Abrego Garcia. “It’s now up to our judicial system to see that Mr. Abrego Garcia receives the due process that the constitution guarantees to all persons.”