Judge Dismisses Criminal Case Against Abrego Garcia
"The move deals an embarrassing blow to the Trump administration, which made the Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the face of its deportation campaign.
A federal judge on Friday dismissed the criminal case against the immigrant Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, ruling that the Trump administration had brought human smuggling charges against him as part of a vindictive effort to punish him for challenging his wrongful deportation to El Salvador last year.
The ruling by the judge, Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., was a stinging rebuke of both the Justice Department and its top official, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general. Judge Crenshaw singled out Mr. Blanche for criticism in his 32-page opinion, pointing to statements he had made that prosecutors reawakened a dormant investigation into Mr. Abrego Garcia only after a different judge in Maryland questioned the administration’s decision to deport him — along with scores of other immigrants — to a notorious Salvadoran prison in March 2025.
The decision, filed in Federal District Court in Nashville, marked the first time that a judge had dismissed a case brought by President Trump’s Justice Department for being rooted in vindictive motives. It showed an emerging willingness among jurists across the country to publicly call out the administration for prioritizing its political imperatives above the pursuit of actual justice.
Mr. Abrego Garcia, who is still fighting the administration’s efforts to expel him from the country, is perhaps the best-known symbol of Mr. Trump's aggressive deportation agenda. His serial legal battles against the administration have dragged on for more than a year, reaching all the way to the Supreme Court. His release from criminal charges because of what Judge Crenshaw called their “vindictive taint” was another blow to the president’s immigration crackdown, which had already been battered by, among other things, the killings of two protesters in Minnesota by federal agents.
Judge Crenshaw opened his ruling by quoting Robert H. Jackson, a former attorney general and Supreme Court justice whose reputation for probity has made him something like the patron saint of federal prosecutors.
“Then-Attorney General Robert H. Jackson warned his fellow prosecutors long ago of the danger of picking the person first and the crime second,” Judge Crenshaw wrote. “‘Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.’”
“That,” the judge concluded, “is the situation here.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia hailed the decision in a statement he released through We are CASA, an immigrant advocacy group.
“Justice is a big word and an even bigger promise to fulfill,” he said. “And I am grateful that today, justice has taken a step forward.”
Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said that prosecutors would appeal Judge Crenshaw's ruling.
“Another activist judge has placed politics above public safety,” she added. “The judge’s order is wrong and dangerous.”
When Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers first asked Judge Crenshaw more than nine months ago to throw out the charges for being vindictive, they reminded him that the administration had removed their client from the United States in violation of a 2019 court order that expressly barred him from being sent to El Salvador.
He ended up with nearly 200 other deportees in a prison built for terrorists, where he claimed he was beaten, deprived of sleep and psychologically tortured over nearly three months.
Instead of simply bringing him back to U.S. soil, the White House began a public campaign to punish him “for daring to fight back,” by filing a lawsuit challenging his removal while he was still in Salvadoran custody. That campaign included vitriolic statements by senior Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, who falsely declared that Mr. Abrego Garcia “was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here.”
Other top aides have called Mr. Abrego Garcia a “rapist,” a “wife beater” and a “terrorist,” while the president, pointing to a photoshopped image, erroneously claimed last year that tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s fingers proved he belonged to MS-13, the violent Salvadoran street gang.
All of this culminated, the lawyers said, in a criminal investigation that led to Mr. Abrego Garcia’s indictment on smuggling charges in front of Judge Crenshaw. On the same day the charges were announced, the Trump administration brought him back from El Salvador, even though Mr. Trump and other officials had repeatedly vowed that was impossible, including at a bizarre Oval Office news conference with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador.
At the heart of the criminal case against Mr. Abrego Garcia was a traffic stop on a Tennessee highway in 2022 during which he was pulled over and discovered to be driving several Hispanic men, some of whom were in the country illegally. Even though the F.B.I. learned about the stop at the time, it decided not to do anything about it, and Mr. Abrego Garcia was released without charges.
In his ruling, Judge Crenshaw noted that the administration did not reopen the inquiry into the traffic stop until more than two years later — tellingly, after Mr. Abrego Garcia challenged his wrongful expulsion from the country.
While the case was largely handled by Robert E. McGuire, a top career prosecutor in Nashville, Judge Crenshaw conducted his own inquiry into the origins of the investigation. He eventually determined that senior Justice Department leaders had peered over Mr. McGuire’s shoulder as he worked, hurried him along toward filing an indictment and sometimes knew more about the case than even he — the man who was supposedly in charge of it — did.
The judge said that one of Mr. Blanche’s top aides, Aakash Singh, was central to what he referred to as “the story of Main Justice’s involvement in the prosecution.”
Mr. Singh, Judge Crenshaw wrote, knew about the government’s star witness before Mr. McGuire did, and contacted him in late April of last year “to fold him into an investigation that was well underway.”
“When Singh contacted McGuire, it was not as a peer, but as McGuire’s supervisor in ODAG,” the judge wrote, referring to the office of the deputy attorney general, which Mr. Blanche ran before he was promoted to acting attorney general. “When Singh informed McGuire about the evidence developed against Abrego, it was clear what Singh and Blanche wanted McGuire to do.”
It remains unclear what Mr. Abrego Garcia may do now that the charges against him have been thrown out.
After failing in their earlier efforts to expel him to several African countries, including Uganda and Eswatini, administration officials are now trying to remove him to Liberia — for the second time. But for the moment, he is protected against hasty deportation by a court order from a federal judge in Maryland, Paula Xinis, who is handling his separate civil case.
Still, Mr. Abrego Garcia has been a free man since last December, when Judge Xinis ordered him to be released from immigration custody. And now that he is no longer facing criminal charges and does not have to appear in court to see them through, he could in theory go anywhere he wants.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump."
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