A federal judge in Nashville ruled on Friday that there was a “realistic likelihood” that the indictment filed against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March and then brought back to face criminal charges, amounted to a vindictive prosecution by the Justice Department.
The ruling was an astonishing rebuke of both the department and some of its top officials, including Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general. Mr. Blanche was called out by name in the ruling for remarks he made about Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case on the same day in June he was returned to U.S. soil to face the charges in Federal District Court in Nashville.
In a 16-page decision, Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. said there was evidence that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s prosecution “may stem from retaliation” by the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Judge Crenshaw found that Trump officials may have sought to punish Mr. Abrego Garcia for having filed a lawsuit successfully challenging his initial “unlawful deportation” to El Salvador.
Moreover, Judge Crenshaw indicated how he was serious about getting to the bottom of the issue of vindictiveness. He said he intended to permit Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to pry, at least in part, into the Trump administration’s process of deciding to bring an indictment in the first place and how the charges related to the deportation case.
Vindictive prosecution motions are exceedingly difficult to win because of the high threshold required to prove that prosecutors acted improperly by filing criminal charges. Under the law, cases can be considered vindictive only if defendants can show that prosecutors displayed animus toward them while they were seeking to vindicate their rights in court, and that the charges would not have been brought except for the existence of that animus.
While Judge Crenshaw has not yet made a final decision on the issue of vindictiveness, the fact that he is even considering doing so in Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case is a hugely embarrassing blow to the Trump administration. From the moment Trump officials acknowledged that they had mistakenly expelled Mr. Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, President Trump and his top aides began a relentless barrage of attacks against him, calling him a violent member of the street gang MS-13, a wife beater and even a terrorist, effectively blaming him for being the victim of their own administrative error.
The judge’s ruling highlighted the ways in which the habit many Trump officials have of speaking out of court about legal cases has — or could — come back to haunt them.
When Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers filed their motion in August, they pointed out that the administration had removed their client from the United States in violation of a 2019 court order that expressly barred him from being sent to El Salvador. They added that instead of taking the traditional path and quickly bringing him back to U.S. soil, the White House “began a public campaign to punish” him “for daring to fight back, culminating in the criminal investigation” that led to his indictment.
That indictment accused Mr. Abrego Garcia, whom the government is now trying to deport again, of having taken part in a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle undocumented immigrants across the United States. At the heart of the case was a 2022 traffic stop during which he was pulled over and discovered to be driving several Hispanic men, some of whom were in the country illegally.
Even though federal agents learned about the stop at the time, they decided not to do anything about it and Mr. Abrego Garcia was released without charges.
Judge Crenshaw homed in on that fact in his ruling, noting that the Justice Department did not seek to charge Mr. Abrego Garcia until 903 days after the initial stop. The one important event that had occurred during that time, he pointed out, was that Mr. Abrego Garcia had complained about his wrongful deportation in a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Maryland and succeeded in persuading three courts — including the Supreme Court — that he should be freed from Salvadoran custody.
The judge also noted that a top prosecutor in the Nashville U.S. attorney’s office, Ben Schrader, had quit on the same day that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s indictment was returned. Moreover, he suggested that administration officials may have strong-armed Mr. Schrader’s boss, Robert E. McGuire, the acting U.S. attorney in Nashville who obtained the indictment, into charging Mr. Abrego Garcia to begin with.
“The timing of Abrego’s indictment suggests a realistic likelihood that senior D.O.J. and D.H.S. officials may have induced Acting U.S. Attorney McGuire (albeit unknowingly) to criminally charge Abrego in retaliation for his Maryland lawsuit,” Judge Crenshaw wrote.
The judge also had harsh words for Mr. Blanche, the No. 2 official at the Justice Department who once served as Mr. Trump’s private defense lawyer. On the day Mr. Abrego Garcia was brought back to the United States to face indictment, Mr. Blanche went on Fox News and declared that the government had started “investigating” the case only after a judge in Maryland had “questioned” the administration’s decision to deport Mr. Abrego Garcia and found that it “had no right.”
“Deputy Attorney General Blanche’s remarkable statements could directly establish that the motivations for Abrego’s criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights to bring suit against the executive official defendants,” Judge Crenshaw wrote, “rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers may be able to determine with more certainty if that in fact occurred as they start asking questions and demanding documents from the administration as part of the discovery process Judge Crenshaw intends to set in motion.
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.
The post Judge Finds ‘Likelihood’ That Charges Against Abrego Garcia Are Vindictive appeared first on New York Times.
