A federal judge overseeing Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s criminal case in Tennessee has ordered Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice officials to refrain from making prejudicial statements about him.
“DOJ and DHS employees who fail to comply with the requirement to refrain from making any statement that ‘will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing’ this criminal prosecution may be subject to sanctions,” wrote U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw.
In his memorandum opinion on Monday, Judge Crenshaw stated that government officials, including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, have made “extrajudicial statements that are troubling, especially where many of them are exaggerated if not simply inaccurate,” specifically citing statements that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.
Prejudicial statements include comments about Abrego Garcia’s character, reputation, and criminal record, Crenshaw said. He added that Trump officials violated a local court rule limiting comments from government employees relating to an ongoing criminal case and ordered the U.S. attorney’s office for the Middle District of Tennessee to notify DOJ and DHS employees about the rule.
In a separate order, the federal judge ordered the government to produce documents under seal to the court about its change in position from “deport but not prosecute” to “prosecute and then deport.”
Crenshaw acknowledged that in an ordinary case, the government would be correct that internal documents revealing the motivations behind a prosecution would be non-discoverable. But, he said, “this is not an ordinary case.”
“Abrego has established a reasonable likelihood that his prosecution was motivated, at least in part, in retaliation for him exercising his constitutional rights in his Maryland immigration case,” Judge Crenshaw wrote.
The judge went on to say that Robert McGuire, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, failed to answer certain questions about Abrego Garcia’s prosecution in a supplemental affidavit he submitted.
“How did Abrego’s case arrive on his desk and why did it show up on April 27, 2025, when the case had previously been closed by DHS on April 1, 2025?,” Crenshaw wrote on Monday in a filing. “Cases do not magically appear on the desks of prosecutors.”
Judge Crenshaw added that the motivations of the people who “place the file” on the prosecutor’s desk are “highly relevant” when considering a motion to dismiss for vindictive prosecution.
The Tennessee judge also ordered the government to produce any emails between the Deputy Attorney General’s Office and McGuire’s office from earlier this year about Abrego Garcia’s prosecution.
Two days of hearings are scheduled in the case next week.
Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native who had been living in Maryland with his wife and children, was deported in March to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison — despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation to that country due to fear of persecution — after the Trump administration claimed he was a member of the criminal gang MS-13, which his family and attorneys deny.
He was brought back to the U.S. in June to face human smuggling charges in Tennessee, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
After being released into the custody of his brother in Maryland pending trial, he was again detained by immigration authorities and is currently being held in a detention facility in Pennsylvania.
Judge Xinis, who has been overseeing Abrego Garcia’s immigration case in Maryland, had earlier banned the government from removing him from the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a court notice on Friday that the West African nation of Liberia had agreed to accept Abrego Garcia, after the agency previously indicated it was planning to deport Abrego Garcia to Eswatini or Uganda.
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