(The Center Square) – The U.S. Department of Justice says a judge was wrong in dismissing smuggling charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia based on a 2022 Tennessee traffic stop.
Abrego Garcia was driving an SUV with eight passengers when he was stopped by law enforcement for speeding. One of the police officers believed that he was smuggling his passengers, remarking that he was “hauling these people for money,” according to a video obtained by The Center Square through an open records request.
Scrutiny of the traffic stop was renewed after Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March 2025 due to an administrative error. Prior to that, Abrego Garcia was living in Maryland and had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in MS-13 in 2019.
He came illegally to the United States as a teenager with his parents around 2011. Officials prepared to deport Abrego Garcia then, but an immigration judge granted him “withholding of removal,” believing his life would be in danger if he were returned to El Salvador.
U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw, in a ruling issued in May, called the charges “vindictive” because Abrego Garcia challenged his 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,” Crenshaw wrote in his order. “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.”
Attorney General Todd Blanche, serving as Deputy Attorney General at the time of Abrego Garcia’s deportation hearing, was quoted in court documents as saying during a media interview, “In this case, we had a judge in Maryland tell us, ‘Oh no, there’s not any evidence that he’s a member of MS-13, you have no right to deport him.’ So what should we do as a Department of Justice when a judge is accusing us of doing something wrong? We have an obligation to everyone, including you, to investigate it. And that’s exactly what we did.”
Prosecutors said in their appeal filed Tuesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit that Blanche’s statements and others do not prove the smuggling case was reopened for vindictive reasons, and enough evidence exists to proceed.
“In a case where the government clearly had probable cause and multiple legitimate bases to prosecute, the court relied on dubious assumptions about public statements, internal communications, timing, diligence and the susceptibility of a professional prosecutor to subconscious influence – all in the context of an initial charging decision where the range of prosecutorial considerations is most complex and least suited to judicial second-guessing,” federal prosecutors said in the brief. “Adopting this approach will lead to a flood of vindictive prosecution motions in high-profile cases.”
The deportation case against Abrego Garcia is also pending.
