A federal judge dismissed criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia after determining the Trump administration concocted the case to justify the immigrant’s deportation to El Salvador.
“The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the government would not have brought this prosecution,” U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. said in a May 22 ruling in the Middle District of Tennessee.
Crenshaw’s decision is just the latest legal victory for the Maryland resident since the successful challenge of his 2025 deportation to the CECOT mega prison in his native El Salvador.
Waverly Crenshaw
The removal occurred despite a 2019 court order barring his expulsion due to credible fears of persecution and admission by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers that the removal was “an administrative error.” The administration responded with unproved allegations Abrego Garcia was a criminal gang member.
The 30-year-old immigrant maintained his willingness throughout the case to be deported to Costa Rica because that country agreed not to return him to El Salvador. Yet the Trump administration instead pursued sending him to a number of African countries that did not make similar pledges.
On April 4 last year, a federal judge in Maryland ordered the Department of Homeland Security to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. The ruling was upheld by a federal appeals court that month and affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court less than a week later.
Even as it claimed it had no power to compel El Salvador to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S., federal authorities in May 2025 reopened a previously dropped human smuggling case stemming from traffic stop in Tennessee three years earlier, and for which he was not cited or charged at the time. He was returned to the U.S. in June that year to face the resurrected charges.
In a post evidentiary hearing brief, the U.S. Department of Justice dismissed claims the revival of the human trafficking case was intended as retaliation against the plaintiff: “The decision to indict stemmed solely from the prosecutorial discretion of the acting United States attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, a career prosecutor. That decision was not animated by animus toward defendant. It was not made under political pressure or expectation.”
Nor did officials in Washington order federal prosecutors in Tennessee to revive the human trafficking charges against Abrego Garcia, the brief said: “Equally as undisputed, the decision to indict was not ordered by leadership at the Department of Justice. Rather, the decision was guided only by the evidence. And the evidence was so strong that it would have been a derogation of duty to not pursue charges.”
But Judge Crenshaw was unmoved by those claims in granting dismissal of Abrego Garcia’s indictment.
“The Executive Branch closed its investigation on the November 2022 traffic stop. Only after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his rights did the Executive Branch reopen that investigation. What the government labels as ‘new evidence’ was not new as a matter of law. The prosecutor’s subjective good faith does not cure the retaliatory taint.”
Crenshaw also disputed DOJ’s claims that it was the federal prosecutor in Tennessee who decided to reopen the human smuggling case. Rather, that prosecutor was “brought into a tainted investigation … to obtain a tainted indictment.”
Ama Frimpong
We Are Casa, an immigrant-led advocacy group, said the ruling vindicates what Abrego Garcia has maintained all along.
“We have said from Day One that this case was nothing more than a political vendetta,” said Ama Frimpong, the organization’s chief of services. “The federal administration brazenly attempted to weaponize the criminal legal system to punish Kilmar for exposing their unlawful actions.”
Abrego Garcia said he was overwhelmed with gratitude at the outcome of the case.
“Thank you to God, my attorneys, We Are CASA, and everyone who has continued to support the fight for justice,” he said. “Justice is a big word and an even bigger promise to fulfill; and I am grateful that today, justice has taken a step forward.”
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