In a sharp rebuke to the Justice Department, a federal judge said on Sunday that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia should be freed from criminal custody as he awaits trial on smuggling charges after his wrongful deportation to El Salvador and return to the United States.
In a scathing order, the judge, Barbara D. Holmes, ruled that Mr. Abrego Garcia was neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community. The decision undermined repeated claims by President Trump and some of his top aides who have described the Salvadoran immigrant as a violent gang member, even a terrorist.
But the decision by Judge Holmes, filed in Federal District Court in Nashville, was likely to be a short-lived victory for Mr. Abrego Garcia and his defense team. The judge acknowledged that he would probably remain in the custody of immigration officials, as his charges of smuggling undocumented immigrants across the United States moved through the courts.
Judge Holmes’s ruling was the first judicial evaluation of the charges filed against Mr. Abrego Garcia since he was suddenly brought back to U.S. soil last month after prosecutors indicted him in Nashville. The decision to get him out of Salvadoran custody came as the Justice Department was under mounting pressure in a separate civil case. The judge in that case has threatened to hold administration officials in contempt for their serial evasions and delays in complying with her order to free him from El Salvador.
Federal prosecutors immediately asked Judge Holmes to put the decision to free Mr. Abrego Garcia on hold, even as his lawyers hailed it.
“We are pleased by the court’s thoughtful analysis and its express recognition that Mr. Abrego Garcia is entitled both to due process and the presumption of innocence, both of which our government has worked quite hard to deny him,” Sean Hecker, one of the defense lawyers, said.
Much of Judge Holmes’s analysis was based on testimony from Peter Joseph, a Homeland Security agent, who took the stand during an all-day detention hearing on June 13 and described the investigation into Mr. Abrego Garcia’s role in the immigrant smuggling ring. That inquiry began in late April, he said, while Mr. Abrego Garcia was languishing in Salvadoran custody and the Trump administration was seeking a way to justify a deportation that it had admitted was a mistake.
In the first few pages of her ruling, Judge Holmes took issue with the government’s core argument in depicting Mr. Abrego as a dangerous criminal. She pointed out that while Mr. Joseph had sought to cast the case as one involving the trafficking of immigrants, including minors, the evidence presented by prosecutors suggested that they were focused on more routine allegations of smuggling.
“To be clear, the offenses of which Abrego is charged are human smuggling, not human trafficking,” she wrote. “Although ‘smuggling’ and ‘trafficking’ were sometimes used interchangeably during the detention hearing, there is a distinct difference between the two under the law. They are not transposable.”
According to the indictment, the case against Mr. Abrego Garcia reaches back to Nov. 30, 2022, when he was stopped for speeding by the Tennessee Highway Patrol in Putnam County. Officers determined that the Chevrolet Suburban he was driving had been altered with “an aftermarket third row of seats designed to carry additional passengers,” the indictment said.
It also noted that there were “nine Hispanic males packed into the S.U.V.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia told the officers that he and his passengers had been in St. Louis doing construction work, according to the indictment. But a subsequent investigation, prosecutors said, revealed that, according to his cellphone and license plate reader data, he was in Texas that morning and nowhere near St. Louis in the prior weeks.
During his testimony, Mr. Joseph said that Mr. Abrego Garcia had 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, according to other members of the conspiracy who were cooperating with the government, Mr. Abrego Garcia sometimes transported drugs and guns as well, and had devised a plan to say that he was driving construction crews if stopped by the authorities.
But Judge Holmes, in her decision, cast doubt on the veracity of the cooperators’ claims, noting that one of them had gotten a deferral of his own deportation in exchange for his testimony and that others had asked for similar benefits.
She also expressed deep skepticism about claims by prosecutors that Mr. Abrego Garcia was a member of the street gang MS-13, saying that he had no prior criminal record and that the accusations of his gang ties largely came from unreliable informants who had contradicted one another.
“The government alleges that Abrego is a longtime, well-known member of MS-13,” Judge Holmes wrote, adding: “But Abrego has no reported criminal history of any kind. And his reputed gang membership is contradicted by the government’s own evidence.”
In one of the more salacious moments of his testimony earlier this month, Mr. Joseph said that Mr. Abrego Garcia had sought to engage in “sexually inappropriate” behavior with some of his female passengers. In her ruling freeing Mr. Abrego Garcia, the judge pushed back forcefully against these accusations, saying she gave “no weight to this evidence.”
Judge Holmes’s rebuke of federal prosecutors came days before the Justice Department was set to respond to allegations that they and other Trump officials should face financial penalties for contempt after flouting a court order to free Mr. Abrego Garcia from Salvadoran custody.
Lawyers for the department have argued that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States should render moot any accusations that they delayed bringing him back. But Judge Paula Xinis, who has been overseeing the civil case in Federal District Court in Maryland, has allowed the contempt investigation to move forward.
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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