Abrego Garcia Charges: What We Know

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the man who was erroneously deported to a prison in El Salvador earlier this year, was flown back to the United States on Friday to face charges related to transporting undocumented migrants.

For months, the Trump administration had resisted court orders instructing officials to bring back Mr. Abrego Garcia, who had been living in Maryland and had a special court order forbidding his deportation to El Salvador.

The fight thrust Mr. Abrego Garcia into the national spotlight, and he became the face of the political and legal turmoil surrounding President Trump’s crackdown on immigration.

Mr. Abrego Garcia appeared in federal court in Nashville on Friday evening. He was detained and is expected to return to court on June 13.

Here’s what we know.

What are the charges?

In court papers seeking his pretrial detention, prosecutors said Mr. Abrego Garcia had played “a significant role” in smuggling immigrants, including unaccompanied minors. A federal indictment unsealed on Friday also accused him of transporting firearms and narcotics purchased in Texas for resale in Maryland.

He appeared in Federal District Court in Nashville on Friday wearing a short-sleeved, white, button-down shirt, The Associated Press reported. Through an interpreter, he said he understood the charges.

If convicted, he could face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for each person he transported, the pretrial detention papers said, a penalty that would go “well beyond the remainder of the defendant’s life.”

Part of the charges stem from a November 2022 traffic stop outside of Cookeville, Tenn., where he was driving nine people from Houston to Maryland, according to the indictment.The stop was captured on video by body cameras worn by the Tennessee Highway Patrol, the indictment said.

According to court papers, the vehicle’s passengers did not have identification. Mr. Abrego Garcia told the state troopers that he and the passengers were returning to Maryland from St. Louis after they spent two weeks doing construction work, the indictment said. Troopers said the passengers did not have luggage or construction equipment in the vehicle.

Mr. Abrego Garcia was not charged with any infraction during the stop but was given a warning for driving with an expired license, the indictment said.

Then on March 12 of this year, he was pulled over again, this time in Maryland by a law enforcement officer while he heading home with his 5-year-old son in the back seat.

He called his wife, Jennifer Vasquez, that night from a detention center in Baltimore. She said immigration agents had accused him of being in the Salvadoran American gang MS-13, stemming from a separate arrest in 2019.

Three days later, Mr. Abrego Garcia was taken to South Texas, where he boarded a flight to the notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as the Terrorism Confinement Center.

What happened during the 2019 arrest?

In March 2019, Mr. Abrego Garcia was standing with three other men in a spot designated for day laborers outside a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Md., when a police officer approached them thinking they were loitering. Two of the men, neither of them Mr. Abrego Garcia, tossed plastic bottles containing marijuana under a parked vehicle.

All four men were arrested and interviewed by the police. Only two of them were accused of having ties to the MS-13 gang. Mr. Abrego Garcia did admit to being in the United States without proper documentation but denied gang membership.

While in detention in 2019, he fought his deportation by requesting a humanitarian exception, because of the gang harassment that his family had experienced in El Salvador. An immigration judge granted him a special status that indefinitely prohibited the government from deporting him to El Salvador.

Why did the U.S. government resist bringing him back?

While Mr. Abrego Garcia and other immigrants were flying to El Salvador, a judge ordered the Trump administration to turn the planes around. The Justice Department continued with the flights despite the order.

Though the government admitted that it had wrongfully deported Mr. Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration fought orders to bring him back to the United States and continued to assert that he was a member of MS-13.

Mr. Trump showed a digitally altered photo of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s tattooed hands as proof. Vice President JD Vance claimed he was a convicted gang member. And a top homeland security official said in a social media post that he had been “found with rolls of cash and drugs.”

After months of legal back and forth, Mr. Abrego Garcia was flown back to the United States on Friday to face federal charges. The 10-page indictment, which was filed last month in Federal District Court in Nashville, could help the White House avoid being held in contempt of court for not facilitating his return.

“Abrego Garcia has landed in the United States to face justice,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said at a news conference on Friday in Washington. She added, “This is what American justice looks like.”