The Justice Department is seeking to reinstate criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, arguing in a late Monday filing that a federal judge wrongly dismantled a case he described as an “abuse of prosecuting power” against a man who had been mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador.
Federal prosecutors are challenging a May decision by U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw, who dismissed human smuggling charges against the Salvadoran national. The ruling delivered a striking rebuke to the Justice Department under President Donald Trump, whose administration has faced repeated allegations that it pursued some defendants for political reasons.
Crenshaw concluded that Abrego Garcia would not have been charged at all if he had not prevailed in a lawsuit over his 2025 deportation. The decision was a setback for the Trump administration, which returned him to the United States only after obtaining a criminal indictment.
The judge did not go so far as to say prosecutors acted with “actual vindictiveness,” a demanding legal standard that typically requires direct proof, such as an admission that charges were brought in retaliation. Still, Crenshaw found sufficient evidence of “presumptive vindictiveness,” pointing in part to the timing of the indictment.
The human smuggling case stemmed from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, an episode Homeland Security had known about for more than two years before Abrego Garcia was deported. According to the court’s findings, officials reopened the matter and began pursuing it aggressively only after Abrego Garcia was ordered returned to the United States.
Crenshaw also cited public statements by U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was serving as a deputy at the time, saying they suggested the Justice Department was focusing on Abrego Garcia because he had won his wrongful-deportation case.
In a brief submitted Monday night to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, federal prosecutors said Crenshaw’s analysis was flawed. They argued that Blanche’s remarks showed a valid basis for prosecution, not retaliation. His reasoning, they wrote, reflected a “normal assessment of the societal interest in punishment” rather than an “improper penalty.” The statements, the brief said, “explained that the government was seeking to protect the public and confirm its prior assertions about Abrego’s criminal activity.”
Prosecutors also argued that even if Blanche’s comments suggested hostility toward Abrego Garcia, they should not control the outcome because the charges were brought by Rob McGuire, then the acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee. That position repeats an argument Crenshaw had already rejected, finding that McGuire’s motives were not the only ones relevant to the case.
Crenshaw’s ruling noted the sustained oversight of the case by top Justice Department officials, including regular communications between McGuire and Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh, in finding that the criminal case was thoroughly tainted. Crenshaw also noted that prosecutors never called as a witness the investigator who actually reopened the case, to explain why.
Abrego Garcia, 31, is a Salvadoran citizen with an American wife and child who has lived in Maryland for years although he immigrated to the U.S. illegally as a teenager. A 2019 order by an immigration judge prohibited his deportation to El Salvador, finding he had a “well founded fear” of a gang that had targeted his family there. The judge allowed him to live and work in the U.S. under Immigration and Customs Enforcement supervision, but he was not given residency status.
Blocked from re-deporting Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, the Trump administration has vowed to deport him to a third county, threatening to send him to Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana and, most recently, Liberia. Abrego Garcia has said he would agree to be deported to Costa Rica, which has said they will accept him, but the government has so far declined to send him there.
He is fighting deportation to Liberia in a separate federal court case in Maryland.
