Defense lawyers for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who was recently brought back to the United States to face a federal indictment after being wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador, said in court papers on Wednesday that he should remain free from custody as he awaits trial.
The papers, filed in Federal District Court in Nashville, amounted to the opening salvo of efforts by the defense lawyers to challenge the charges that were filed last week against Mr. Abrego Garcia.
“With no legal process whatsoever, the United States government illegally detained and deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia and shipped him to the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) in El Salvador, one of the most violent, inhumane prisons in the world,” the lawyers wrote.
“The government now asks this court to detain him further,” they went on, asking Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., who is handling the criminal case, to deny the request. Judge Crenshaw is set to hold a hearing on Friday to arraign Mr. Abrego Garcia and to hear arguments about whether to detain him before the trial.
Mr. Abrego Garcia, a metalworker who was living in Maryland when he was arrested on March 12 and summarily deported three days later to El Salvador, had for weeks been trying through lawyers representing him in a separate civil case to enforce a court order instructing the Trump administration to take active measures toward securing his freedom.
But after the administration repeatedly sought to sidestep and delay complying with that order, the Justice Department abruptly changed course. Top department officials announced on Friday that Mr. Abrego Garcia had been brought back to the United States to stand trial on charges of taking part in a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle thousands of undocumented immigrants across the country as a member of the violent street gang MS-13.
In two written requests to Judge Crenshaw to keep Mr. Abrego Garcia locked up as his criminal case moved forward, federal prosecutors argued that he presented a “serious risk” of flight because of the possibility that he or members of MS-13 might intimidate some of the government’s witnesses.
The prosecutors also argued that he might flee because he faced a lengthy sentence if convicted and could confront the possibility of being deported again.
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s defense lawyers pushed back against those claims in several ways. Chief among them, they struck at the heart of the Justice Department’s indictment by denying what they described as “the government’s baseless gang-affiliation allegations.”
The defense lawyers also rejected the idea that their client was a flight risk, telling Judge Crenshaw that he had no prior felony convictions or any history of evading arrest. They noted further that the sentence he was likely to face if found guilty was relatively modest.
As for the claim that Mr. Abrego Garcia might fear being deported again, the defense lawyers argued that because he had just been held in the “notoriously inhuman” CECOT prison, he actually had an increased chance of obtaining asylum protections against being sent back to El Salvador.
According to the indictment, the case against Mr. Abrego Garcia reached back to Nov. 30, 2022, when he was stopped for speeding by the Tennessee Highway Patrol on Interstate 40, in Putnam County. Officers determined that the Chevrolet Suburban he was driving had been altered with “an aftermarket third row of seats designed to carry additional passengers,” the indictment said.
It also noted that there were “nine Hispanic males packed into the S.U.V.”
Prosecutors say that Mr. Abrego Garcia told the officers that he and his passengers had been in St. Louis for the previous two weeks doing construction work. But the indictment alleged that he was lying and that a subsequent investigation showed that cellphone and license plate reader data indicated he had been in Texas that morning and nowhere near St. Louis for the preceding weeks.
Those assertions, however, appeared to be contradicted by a summary of the initial police report that was released by the Department of Homeland Security in April as the Trump administration was seeking to depict Mr. Abrego Garcia as an MS-13 member. The summary notes that when he was stopped by the police, he clearly told officers that he was coming from Texas and had merely passed through St. Louis.
Top officials in the Justice Department have said they believe that the initial order to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release from El Salvador, issued in April by Judge Paula Xinis, who is handling the civil case, was rendered moot after officials successfully brought him back to the United States to face criminal charges.
In fact, shortly after the charges were unsealed, lawyers for the department asked Judge Xinis, who sits in Federal District Court in Maryland, to put all of the proceedings in the civil case on hold as they prepared a motion to dismiss it altogether.
But lawyers handling the civil case for Mr. Abrego Garcia believe that it should be allowed to continue.
Those lawyers were in fact poised to file a new motion in the civil case on Wednesday night, asking the judge to hold administration officials in contempt of court for what they have called “an elaborate, all-of-government effort to defy court orders.”
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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