For nearly six years, Task Force Vulcan, a federal law enforcement team set up by President Trump during his first term in the White House, was enormously successful in pursuing its central mission: taking down the leadership of the violent transnational street gang MS-13.
But by this spring, the group was redirected into carrying out what appeared to be contradictory goals.
The unit’s agents and prosecutors were asked to unwind some of the charges they had brought against MS-13’s highest-ranking leaders even as they diverted resources into prosecuting a defendant whose ties to the gang were far more tenuous but whose case had become a political liability for the Trump administration.
In late April, Vulcan prosecutors were engaged in a pitched legal battle to dismiss the criminal case against an MS-13 leader named Vladimir Arévalo Chávez who was accused of serious crimes, including multiple murders. The goal was to release Mr. Arévalo from U.S. custody and send him back to his homeland in El Salvador.
At the same time, the Vulcan team was assembling a criminal case against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man accused of belonging to the gang who had been wrongly deported to El Salvador. Prosecutors were seeking to free Mr. Abrego Garcia from Salvadoran custody and bring him back to the United States to face indictment on charges of smuggling undocumented immigrants.
By any measure, the task force’s split-screen mission was unusual as Vulcan team members unraveled indictments against some of the most senior members of MS-13 even as they began to build one against Mr. Abrego Garcia — a man who, according to the charges that were ultimately filed, appeared to be a midlevel functionary in the gang.
The dueling moves were, among other things, a reflection of how federal law enforcement officers have at times been put in the position of pursuing the Trump administration’s shifting political agenda.
“Traditionally speaking, law enforcement wants to deport people who present a lesser threat to public safety and seeks to imprison those who have done serious damage to it,” said Daniel C. Richman, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Columbia Law School. “This situation is exactly the opposite.”
An investigation by The New York Times has found that Vulcan prosecutors, who spent years painstakingly building two indictments against MS-13 leadership, began to dismiss some of those charges shortly after a deal that the Trump administration struck this year with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador.
Mr. Bukele had agreed to accept more than 200 migrants expelled from the United States into a prison he built for terrorists. And in exchange, the United States paid El Salvador millions of dollars, adding an important sweetener at Mr. Bukele’s request: the return of key MS-13 leaders in American custody.
The indictment of Mr. Abrego Garcia had different political value for the White House.
The decision to pull him from El Salvador and prosecute him in the United States provided Trump officials with an offramp for avoiding a damaging conflict with the courts, which had repeatedly ordered them to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody.
By bringing him back, the administration was able to stave off potential contempt proceedings while also flexing its law-and-order muscles.
In a remarkable convergence, Mr. Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador on March 15 on the same series of flights as César Humberto López Larios, one of the MS-13 leaders whose charges were successfully dismissed by Task Force Vulcan.
But the two men ended up on those flights for different reasons.
Prosecutors said they were sending Mr. López back because of emerging “national security concerns” by the Trump administration — a nod to the deal with Mr. Bukele. He had been in U.S. custody for less than a year and was awaiting trial on Long Island on narco-terrorism charges.
Mr. Abrego Garcia, on the other hand, was placed on a plane because of what several officials have admitted was an “administrative error.” Even though he had been living in the United States illegally for years, a court order issued in 2019 had expressly prohibited the authorities from returning him to his homeland, where he might face persecution.
Another convergence occurred two months ago when lawyers for Mr. Arévalo, who goes by the nickname “Vampiro,” were fighting an effort by Vulcan prosecutors to dismiss his charges and deport him to El Salvador. On April 30, the lawyers, citing recent news reports, said the decision to send Mr. Arévalo back had stemmed from an “arrangement between the president of El Salvador and the president of the United States.”
Only two days earlier, Task Force Vulcan had been brought in to assist in the investigation of Mr. Abrego Garcia, according to the inquiry’s case agent, Peter Joseph. Mr. Joseph testified this month that the investigation had begun on April 28 and that before then he had never even heard of Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Much about the origins of the Abrego Garcia case remains unknown, but several government filings in the proceeding have been signed by the two co-directors of the task force, Jake Warren and Chris Eason.
And Attorney General Pam Bondi thanked Vulcan prosecutors for their work when she announced the charges against Mr. Abrego Garcia at a Washington news conference this month.
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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