The Department of Homeland Security admitted to scrounging around for dirt on Kilmar Abrego Garcia only after he was wrongfully deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Freshly returned from a Salvadoran prison, Abrego Garcia attended an arraignment hearing in Nashville Friday, where he pleaded not guilty to two charges related to illegally transporting undocumented immigrants for cash. The charges stemmed from an investigation into a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, where Abrego Garcia was discovered in a car with several Hispanic men who did not possess identification.
During the hearing Friday, one DHS agent revealed that he was only asked to look into Abrego Garcia’s case on April 28 of this year, according to Tennessee Lookout’s Anita Wadhwani.
That’s more than a month after Abrego Garcia was sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison, and a week after Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to recover his kidnapped constituent, boosting the story’s profile to the national level. That was also a full week after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed, seemingly out of nowhere and without providing any evidence, that Abrego Garcia had “engaged in human trafficking.”
Last week, after months of claiming that Abrego Garcia would never return to the United States despite being deported over an “administrative error,” Attorney General Pam Bondi announced his return and made several other allegations against Abrego Garcia that were not included in the indictment.
Since accidentally sending Abrego Garcia abroad, the Trump administration has been intent on smearing him any way it can, repeatedly alleging an affiliation to the transnational MS-13 gang based on thin evidence and even falsely claiming he was a convicted criminal.
Bondi said that if Abrego Garcia is convicted, the government plans to return him to El Salvador after he completes his sentence, once again violating a judge’s order preventing his removal.
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