CNN
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A judge in Tennessee said the Justice Department hasn’t made a convincing case that Kilmar Abrego Garcia should be kept in pretrial detention, though the mistakenly deported man who was returned to the US is likely to remain in federal immigration custody regardless.
Abrego Garcia is being held in Tennessee as he faces a federal indictment of smuggling undocumented immigrants across state lines in 2022. The US returned him from El Salvador this month after the indictment was unsealed, ending a political standoff over his due process rights.
His court proceedings have become a vessel for the Trump Justice Department’s hardball approach to immigration enforcement in which it has sought to portray Abrego Garcia as part of a gang operation in Maryland.
But as she ruled in Abrego Garcia’s favor, Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes of the federal court in Nashville said Sunday that “the government failed to prove” so far that he endangered any minor victim, might try to flee from the law or might attempt to obstruct justice, as the Justice Department had argued. She noted that under federal criminal law, the Justice Department hadn’t even shown it had enough evidence to hold a hearing seeking his pretrial detention.
Still, Abrego Garcia is likely to remain in federal custody, because immigration authorities will be able to keep him detained separate from his criminal case. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Holmes’ opinion is still a notable one, building upon six hours of evidence and testimony regarding Abrego Garcia’s detention earlier this month, in what amounted to a preview of what may be evidence used at a trial.
Holmes’ 51-page ruling essentially deems some DOJ accusations about Abrego Garcia to be overblown — built upon evidence with questionable reliability from a traffic stop, cooperators in the case providing information to law enforcement through hearsay, and a shaky theory of victimizing children in a human-smuggling operation when that has not been charged or proved by the DOJ, the judge wrote.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and the prosecutor in the case, Robert McGuire, had emphasized how smuggling operations could be dangerous affairs. The danger, the Justice Department argued, stretched from putting adults and children at risk while traveling in packed vehicles, potentially without seat belts, to how the transport of migrants could connect to gang membership in the US.
“There is no dispute the offenses of which Abrego is charged are not crimes against children and the involvement of a minor child is not an element of the charged offenses,” Holmes wrote Sunday.
And, she wrote, “the government cannot simply rely on the general reputation of a particular street gang” to argue Abrego Garcia may be dangerous if he has ties to the group MS-13, as the Justice Department had argued, citing the beliefs of cooperators facing their own charges and deportations.
The Justice Department has already appealed the magistrate judge’s decision.
A senior DOJ official, speaking to CNN, downplayed the significance of the loss in court Sunday and noted it is coming from a magistrate judge. The administration is optimistic it will have a better chance with a federal district court judge but will not be deterred in pursuing the criminal case against Abrego if early appeals do not go its way, the official said.
Holmes has set another hearing for Wednesday in Nashville to discuss Abrego Garcia’s release conditions.
Responding to the opinion, Abrego Garcia’s defense attorney Sean Hecker said, “We are pleased by the Court’s thoughtful analysis and its express recognition that Mr. Abrego Garcia is entitled both to due process and the presumption of innocence, both of which our government has worked quite hard to deny him.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said Sunday on X that “Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a dangerous criminal illegal alien. We have said it for months and it remains true to this day: he will never go free on American soil.“
Abrego Garcia was returned to the US this month to face the charges after he was mistakenly deported to El Salvador three months before. He has pleaded not guilty to federal charges of human smuggling related to a 2022 traffic stop in which he drove a Chevrolet Suburban with nine Hispanic male passengers through Tennessee. Justice Department prosecutors allege Abrego Garcia transported undocumented people in the US on more than 100 trips between Texas, Maryland and other states.
Prosecutors say over several years, Abrego Garcia “operated in the illicit world of an international smuggling ring.”
But according to legal filings, evidence and statements from prosecutors in the case so far, the man was a cog in a larger alleged scheme of transporting undocumented immigrants from Texas to Maryland for profit.
Separately, Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation had caused a political crisis for the Trump administration. Courts had ordered the federal government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador this spring because he had been mistakenly sent there. Yet the administration didn’t bring him back for weeks, until a grand jury handed up its indictment in late May.
In a separate federal court proceeding in Maryland, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys are arguing for Trump administration officials to be sanctioned because of their handling of his deportation and the lack of information they provided to his legal team following multiple court orders while he was imprisoned in El Salvador.
The government deported the father of three in mid-March, violating a 2019 court order that barred his removal to El Salvador because of fears that he would face gang violence there.
CNN’s Paula Reid contributed to this report.
