The Trump administration has freed a convicted human smuggler in its desperate bid to convict Kilmar Abrego Garcia of the same charge.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported Abrego Garcia in March—a move the Department of Justice (DOJ) admitted was an error—before a federal judge forced the administration to return him. Abrego Garcia was placed in federal custody on a human smuggling charge as soon as he set foot on U.S. soil again.
Despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to focus mass deportation efforts on criminals—the “worst of the worst”—the DOJ has now released three-time felon Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes from federal prison and transferred him to a halfway house in exchange for his testimony against Abrego Garcia, an undocumented father from Maryland.
“It’s wild to me,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director at the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, told the Washington Post. “It’s just further evidence of how the government is using Kilmar’s case to further their propaganda and prove their political point.”
In exchange for testifying against Abrego Garcia, prosecutors have reportedly promised Hernandez he will be permitted to stay in the U.S. for at least a year. ICE officials, meanwhile, have said Abrego Garcia will be deported again in the event he is convicted at trial.
The Trump administration flew Abrego Garcia to a notorious El Salvadoran prison in March as a result of what the DOJ described as an administrative error; an immigration judge previously ruled that it was not safe for Abrego Garcia to be deported to his home country.
In a move denounced by critics as an attempt to save face over the gaffe, officials returned Abrego Garcia to the U.S. earlier this month and then charged him with smuggling, based partly on Hernandez’s testimony.
Abrego Garcia, 29, has not been convicted of a crime in the United States, where he has resided since he was 16. He has denied involvement with the notorious MS-13 street gang, which the White House maintains he is a member of.
He has pleaded not guilty to human smuggling charges, which stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee where he was allegedly driving a van full of other undocumented migrants. Charges in that case were not filed until May—well after Abrego Garcia became a flashpoint in Trump’s migrant crackdown—and were unsealed upon Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. this month.
Hernandez, now the DOJ’s star witness in its case against the Maryland father of three, who is married to an American, has had many more run-ins with U.S. law enforcement. He served time for three separate federal offenses: smuggling migrants, illegally reentering the country, and drunkenly discharging a firearm in a residential neighborhood.
He has been either arrested or in prison every year for the past decade, per the Post’s report. His record dates back to at least 2015, when he was fined for public intoxication in Virginia. A year later, Texas police arrested him for alleged possession of cocaine, and in 2017, he was picked up for driving under the influence with a handgun in the car.
Following his first removal in February 2018, the U.S. Border Patrol arrested him again after he had waded into the country from across the Rio Grande. He entered a guilty plea for crossing illegally and served 30 days before being deported again in May of that year.
Hernandez resurfaced in Mississippi the following December, when officers pulled him over to discover several undocumented migrants in his vehicle. He later admitted he had been transporting people into the country at $350 a head, pleaded guilty to human smuggling, and in 2020 was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison.
The latest incident took place in late 2022. Texas police arrested Hernandez, who appeared “highly intoxicated” at the time, after he was seen riding around a Montgomery County community firing a handgun from the passenger side of the vehicle in broad daylight, for which he received two years in prison.
ICE has further clarified that it does not plan to return the Maryland dad to his native El Salvador but rather to an unspecified “third country.” Under Trump’s nationwide deportation drive, a number of Latin American migrants have already found themselves removed to South Sudan, an East African nation ravaged by more than two years of civil war.
A federal judge allowed Abrego Garcia to be released on his own recognizance ahead of his smuggling trial. However, his lawyers begged to keep him in custody ahead of trial, as ICE signaled it would arrest and deport him as soon as he stepped free.
The DOJ accepted Abrego Garcia’s request to remain behind bars. His next hearing is scheduled for July 16.
The post Trump Frees Felon to Keep Deported Maryland Dad Locked Up appeared first on The Daily Beast.
