In a pivotal hearing on alleged vindictive prosecution, attorneys for Kilmar Abrego Garcia urged a federal judge to dismiss his case, citing the Trump administration’s reluctance to allow high-ranking officials to testify about the prosecution’s origins.

Amid growing claims that the Department of Justice was targeting individuals perceived as adversaries of then-President Donald Trump, Abrego Garcia, a wrongfully deported Salvadoran national, successfully convinced U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw of the necessity for further investigation. Judge Crenshaw determined that the circumstances presented enough evidence to suggest a “realistic likelihood of vindictiveness,” warranting both discovery and an evidentiary hearing before considering Abrego’s motion for dismissal.

Abrego Garcia was deported from Maryland in March 2025 and subsequently detained in El Salvador at the Terrorism Confinement Center following Trump’s Alien Enemies Act proclamation. This action came amid accusations linking detainees to gang affiliations.

The Trump administration later admitted that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error,” firing the lawyer who disclosed this mistake. Following a Supreme Court order, the administration facilitated his return to the U.S. in June 2025. This return occurred just weeks after a federal indictment in Tennessee charged him with human smuggling, related to a 2022 traffic stop investigation.

Judge Crenshaw acknowledged that remarks made by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—who had previously served as Trump’s criminal defense attorney and was now acting Attorney General after Pam Bondi’s dismissal—hinted at potential vindictiveness. Blanche’s comments on Fox News suggested Abrego Garcia faced prosecution as a form of retribution for challenging the government successfully in a habeas corpus case.

“To dispel any misconceptions, Deputy Attorney General Blanche stated that the criminal proceedings were initiated to bring Abrego back to the United States, not due to a judge’s decision, but rather because of an arrest warrant issued by a grand jury in the Middle District of Tennessee,” noted Judge Crenshaw, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.

Blanche’s statements, the judge went on, “could directly establish that the motivations for Abrego’s criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights to bring suit against the Executive Official Defendants, rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct.”

But the Trump administration vehemently resisted having Blanche and other high-ranking officials testify about internal deliberations, and instead threatened to seek extraordinary appellate relief. As both sides wrestled over discovery and sanctions, the evidentiary hearing had to be pushed back multiple times.

Ultimately, the government put forth two witnesses on Feb. 26, former acting U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire and Nashville-based Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge Rana Saoud. To hear the Trump administration tell it, neither of them were aware of the 2022 traffic stop until reading a Tennessee Star report in April 2025, which Saoud saw and then told McGuire about.

“Obtaining new evidence is textbook grounds to rebut the presumption of vindictiveness,” the DOJ said in its post-hearing filing. “That is precisely what happened here.”

Unsurprisingly, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have now responded that we’ll never know the truth because the people with that knowledge — Blanche or his Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh, who allegedly “handed Mr. McGuire the key cooperator and pressured him to charge quickly” — did not testify.

“Instead of calling the actual witnesses who could explain the decision to reinvestigate and charge Mr. Abrego, the government called Agent Saoud and Mr. McGuire. But their testimony is insufficient to meet the government’s burden because it is both legally irrelevant and patently incredible. As he has throughout this case, Mr. McGuire attempted to present himself as an independent decisionmaker who could not be swayed by pressures from the ‘high command’ to indict Mr. Abrego for vindictive reasons,” the filing said. “He insisted throughout his testimony that he was taking no direction from ODAG and was merely keeping Mr. Singh updated.”

“Similarly implausible, Agent Saoud claimed to have decided on her own, based on a newspaper article (planted by DHS sources according to the article itself), to open a purportedly separate investigation into Mr. Abrego. These explanations for the decisions to reopen the investigation and ultimately charge Mr. Abrego fly in the face of the documentary record, strain common sense, and amount to nothing more than legally irrelevant assertions of subjective good faith,” the defense went on.

As a case-in-point that “senior DOJ officials remain in charge of this prosecution,” the defense noted that Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the DOJ’s top lawyer on civil matters and a former Mar-a-Lago prosecution defense attorney, entered an appearance in the case as soon as it seemed discovery would move forward.

Reminding the judge earlier found the government’s “unwillingness to provide discovery that answers” key questions “particularly puzzling,” the defense insisted the DOJ solved the puzzle all on its own.

“The government has no non-vindictive, ‘objective explanations’ for the decision to charge Mr. Abrego,” the filing concluded. “The testimony and limited discovery the government has produced supports no explanation for this case other than the one Mr. Blanche has publicly expressed: that Mr. Abrego was vindictively prosecuted because he successfully challenged his unlawful removal to El Salvador.”