{"id":152459,"date":"2025-06-06T23:25:54","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T23:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/kilmar-abrego-garcia-has-been-returned-to-the-u-s-to-face-federal-criminal-charges-nbc-news\/"},"modified":"2025-06-06T23:25:54","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T23:25:54","slug":"kilmar-abrego-garcia-has-been-returned-to-the-u-s-to-face-federal-criminal-charges-nbc-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/kilmar-abrego-garcia-has-been-returned-to-the-u-s-to-face-federal-criminal-charges-nbc-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been returned to the U.S. to face federal criminal charges – NBC News"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Kilmar Abrego Garcia<\/a>, the Maryland man whose erroneous deportation to El Salvador<\/a> became a protracted battle over due process and a test of wills, has been returned to the United States to face human smuggling charges in Tennessee.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday in a news conference that he had landed in the U.S. \u201cto face justice.\u201d
Abrego Garcia has been named in an indictment charging him with transporting within the U.S. people not legally in the country. The two-count indictment, sealed by a Tennessee court last month, alleges that Abrego Garcia participated in a conspiracy over nine years to move people from Texas deeper into the country.
The indictment alleges that those transported included members of the MS-13 gang and that he worked with co-conspirators.
Federal prosecutors asked the judge overseeing the case against Abrego Garcia to keep him detained pending trial, in part because, they say, he poses a danger to the community and poses a serious risk of flight, according to a detention memo. They said testimony at trial will show that he transported “approximately 50 undocumented aliens throughout the United States per month for several years.\u201d
Prosecutors added that he faces a maximum of 10 years imprisonment for \u201ceach alien\u201d he has transported, which they say is effectively a life sentence.
The Justice Department said that Abrego Garcia used his status in MS-13 to \u201cfurther his criminal activity.\u201d President Donald Trump said to reporters Friday that he never should have been returned and pointed to the grand jury findings.
\u201cThis was his full-time job, not a contractor,\u201d Bondi said. \u201cHe was a smuggler of humans and children and women. He made over 100 trips, the grand jury found, smuggling people throughout our country.\u201d
Abrego Garcia\u2019s attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, said bringing him back for prosecution \u201cis an abuse of power, not justice.\u201d
\u201cThe government disappeared Kilmar to a foreign prison in violation of a court order,\u201d Sandoval-Moshenberg said in a statment. \u201cNow, after months of delay and secrecy, they\u2019re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him. This shows that they were playing games with the court all along. Due process means the chance to defend yourself before you\u2019re punished, not after.\u201d
The indictment alleges that from about 2016 to 2025, Abrego Garcia and others conspired to bring migrants illegally to the United States from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador and elsewhere, through Mexico and across the Texas-Mexico border.
Abrego Garcia and a co-conspirator \u201cordinarily picked up the undocumented aliens in Houston, Texas area\u201d after they had crossed the border. The pair then allegedly would transport \u201cthe undocumented aliens from Texas to other parts of the United States to further the aliens\u2019 unlawful presence in the United States,\u201d the indictment said.
In the indictment, the government said Abrego Garcia and six other uncharged and unnamed co-conspirators communicated using cellphones and social media to unlawfully transport the undocumented immigrants.
They allege that Abrego Garcia would hold the cellphones of those he was transporting within the U.S. and would return them at the end of their trip, \u201cthey did this to ensure the undocumented aliens could not and would not contact anyone else during the trip,\u201d the government said in the indictment.
The indictment also claims Abrego Garcia and other conspirators would reconfigure vehicles to transport the immigrants and that children would travel on floorboards. On one occasion, the Tennessee Highway Patrol stopped Abrego Garcia while he was driving a Suburban with \u201can after-market third row of seats placed where a cargo area should be, which was occupied by undocumented passengers.\u201d
The government further alleged that Abrego Garcia and co-conspirators collected financial payments from the immigrants and transferred money between one another to conceal the origin of the payments. The indictment claimed that he was involved in the transport of 150 migrants in a tractor trailer that overturned in Mexico, killing 50 and injuring others.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, where Abrego Garcia was a resident, pointed out that he was deported on March 15 and said that it was \u201cabout time\u201d he was returned.
\u201cThey obviously want to make this about whether or not he ends up being a good guy or a bad guy, but it\u2019s not a moral question,” Raskin told CNN. \u201cIt\u2019s a legal question. It\u2019s a constitutional question of whether the government can pick people up and take them out of country.\u201d
Abrego Garcia\u2019s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, has insisted that he was not involved in criminal activity.
\u201cKilmar worked in construction and sometimes transported groups of workers between job sites, so it\u2019s entirely plausible he would have been pulled over while driving with others in the vehicle,\u201d his wife previously said in a statement<\/a>. \u201cHe was not charged with any crime or cited for any wrongdoing\u201d at the time.
The family’s attorney, Chris Newman, said Friday that the Trump administration for months engaged in “a campaign of disinformation, defamation against Kilmar and his family.”
“Kilmar will finally get his day in court,” Newman said.
The Trump <\/strong>administration has released various allegations against Abrego Garcia over time to support its deportation of him and in response to court demands. Abrego Garcia was on his way home from a job in Baltimore with his child in the car when he was pulled over on March 12. He was detained in several different facilities.
A federal judge and the U.S. Supreme Court in April<\/a> ordered the federal government to facilitate Abrego Garcia\u2019s return to the U.S., but the administration dragged its feet and resisted. At times, the administration insisted that his return was up to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele<\/a>, who, after refusing to send him back wrote on X Friday<\/a> that \u201cof course we wouldn\u2019t refuse\u201d the request of the Trump administration.
Bondi said the U.S. presented an arrest warrant to El Salvador, and \u201cthey agreed to send him back.\u201d
The Trump administration previously agreed to pay El Salvador $6 million<\/a> to imprison about 300 people it alleged were members of the Tren de Aragua gang for one year.
U.S. officials accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 and gave that as reason to deport him, despite a judge\u2019s order from 2019 barring him from being sent to his home country.
He was taken to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador<\/a>, known for its harsh and brutal conditions. Government attorneys had said he was taken there as a result of \u201cadministrative error.\u201d
Abrego Garcia\u2019s wife said she did not know he was in the El Salvador prison until she recognized him in a video of detainees taken from a plane that Bukele posted.
The Supreme Court ruled in April that Abrego Garcia\u2019s removal was \u201cillegal\u201d and determined that a judge\u2019s order for the administration to facilitate his return was proper.
As calls for his return intensified, the administration doubled down on keeping him incarcerated in El Salvador.
Despite orders to bring him back, the administration stood its ground repeatedly, raising concerns about its defiance of the judicial branch and setting off threats of contempt from the bench.
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration just last week to give hundreds of migrants in El Salvador\u2019s CECOT prison the chance to challenge their detentions and removals.<\/a>
Newman, the Abrego Garcia family attorney, said that Abrego Garcia expressed doubts about the charges.
“We\u2019ve been concerned for some time that either the Trump administration or the Bukele administration would gin up charges against him to kind of backfill the violation of rights, that are demonstrable, that they\u2019ve engaged in,” he said.
Suzanne Gamboa is a national reporter for NBC News and NBC Latino.
Tom Winter is a New York-based correspondent covering crime, courts, terrorism and financial fraud on the East Coast for the NBC News Investigative Unit.
Chloe Atkins reports for the NBC News National Security and Law Unit, based in New York.
© 2025 NBCUniversal Media, LLC<\/p>\n

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