A federal judge signaled on Friday that she was open to granting bail to Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, one week after he was returned to the United States to face criminal charges following his wrongful deportation to El Salvador.
If the judge, Barbara D. Holmes, does end up denying the Justice Department’s request to detain Mr. Abrego Garcia as he awaits trial, it would be a significant rebuke of the Trump administration, which has repeatedly accused him of being a dangerous criminal, even a terrorist. But it would also represent a Pyrrhic victory for him and his defense team because, as Judge Holmes pointed out, he would almost certainly be taken into custody by immigration officials.
Judge Holmes declined to make a final decision on the question of bail at a daylong hearing in Federal District Court in Nashville where Mr. Abrego Garcia pleaded not guilty to a two-count federal indictment unsealed last Friday. The indictment, which was obtained in May while he was being held in Salvadoran custody, charged him with having taken part in a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle undocumented immigrants across the United States as a member of the violent street gang MS-13.
The judge said she intended to issue a written decision about Mr. Abrego Garcia’s bail “sooner rather than later.”
During the hearing, federal prosecutors threw everything they had at Mr. Abrego Garcia in an effort to persuade Judge Holmes that he was a flight risk and a danger to the community. In an unusual move, the presentation was made personally by Robert E. McGuire, the acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee.
Mr. McGuire brought up two domestic violence complaints that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife had filed against him years ago. He accused the defendant, a Salvadoran man who had been living in Maryland at the time of his expulsion, of transporting children as part of the smuggling operation. And he asserted there was evidence that Mr. Abrego Garcia had sexually harassed some of his young female passengers.
He even claimed — to the subsequent objection of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers — that political sympathizers might somehow harbor the defendant and help him escape if he were not detained.
Judge Holmes expressed skepticism about many of Mr. McGuire’s assertions, some of which were based on uncorroborated accusations from cooperating witnesses who had asked the government for benefits related to their own immigration status or to criminal charges that they themselves were facing.
The decision to pull Mr. Abrego Garcia from El Salvador and put him on trial in an American courtroom was, in some sense, a way for the Trump administration to defuse one of the highest-profile legal battles it has faced in recent months over President Trump’s authority to seize and deport foreign immigrants.
By bringing an indictment, the Justice Department gave itself a good excuse to return Mr. Abrego Garcia to the United States — a move that served to avoid a painful confrontation with the judge in his civil case while also burnishing the White House’s law-and-order image.
The criminal case was already under something of a cloud after it was revealed last week that Ben Schrader, the former chief of the criminal division in Mr. McGuire’s office, had resigned over how the indictment had been secured. Mr. McGuire hinted at the turmoil in his office during Friday’s hearing, telling Judge Holmes that he had only appeared in court himself because he was “the last man standing.”
Many of his assertions were based on testimony from Peter Joseph, an agent with Homeland Security Investigations, who took the witness stand and laid out several details of the Justice Department investigation that had led to the indictment. According to Mr. Joseph, that inquiry began around April 28, as the Trump administration was facing pressure from three court orders — including one from the Supreme Court — to work toward freeing Mr. Abrego Garcia from Salvadoran custody.
Mr. Joseph testified that Mr. Abrego Garcia earned as much as $100,000 a year transporting immigrants across the country as part of the smuggling ring — often on a route from Texas to Maryland. The agent said that other members of the conspiracy who were cooperating with the government had told him that Mr. Abrego Garcia sometimes transported drugs and guns as well, and had devised a plan to say that he was driving construction crews from place to place if stopped by the authorities.
One such stop occurred on a highway in Putnam County, Tennessee, in November 2022, when officers discovered nine Hispanic men in the Chevrolet Suburban that Mr. Abrego Garcia was driving. While he told the officers that he and his passengers had recently been in St. Louis doing construction work, Mr. Joseph testified, cellphone and license plate reader data later indicated that he had actually been in Texas that morning and nowhere near St. Louis for the preceding few weeks.
Mr. Joseph added that Mr. Abrego Garcia often brought his wife and two of his young children on trips as a cover for his smuggling operation. He would place the children on the floorboards of his vehicle, the agent said, to allow more room for paying passengers.
At one point, Mr. Joseph offered uncorroborated testimony that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s bosses — one of whom appeared to be cooperating — had complained that he had tried to engage in “sexually inappropriate” behavior with some of his female passengers. When the agent added that there was also evidence that Mr. Abrego Garcia had solicited naked images from a woman connected to the smuggling ring, Judge Holmes warned him not to delve too deeply into what amounted to salacious hearsay.
On cross-examination, Richard Tennent, a lawyer for Mr. Abrego Garcia, sought to undermine the notion that his client would have taken his wife and children — two of whom have autism — on long road trips several times in the same week. Another lawyer for Mr. Abrego Garcia, Dumaka Shabazz, said that such accounts should not be trusted because they had come from an “untested, uncross-examined” cooperator.
“He’s playing the government,” Mr. Shabazz said. “He’s playing the game and the government is giving him a get-out-of-jail free card.”
The hearing in Nashville was the second time Mr. Abrego Garcia had appeared in front of a judge since the Trump administration brought him back from El Salvador in an abrupt and stunning change of course in its handling of a separate civil case that his family filed in March seeking to win his freedom.
For most of the past two months, administration officials had taken an aggressively recalcitrant approach toward the court orders arising from the civil case that instructed them to take steps toward getting Mr. Abrego Garcia out of Salvadoran custody and provide him with the due process he had been denied.
Even though top Justice Department officials have maintained that the civil case should be dismissed now that Mr. Abrego Garcia is back on U.S. soil, the judge overseeing it, Paula Xinis, has allowed it to move forward for the moment.
On Wednesday night, in fact, lawyers representing Mr. Abrego Garcia in the civil matter laid out a detailed inventory of the administration’s “sustained and flagrant” legal violations. They asked Judge Xinis to appoint a special master to investigate the misconduct and impose financial penalties, if warranted, as a punishment for contempt.
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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