From the moment that the Trump administration brought Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia back from his wrongful deportation to El Salvador to face criminal charges, the Justice Department has insisted that the indictment filed against him was a necessary tool to seek accountability against a dangerous criminal.
The prosecutors who brought the case, in Federal District Court in Nashville, have repeatedly said they intend to move toward trial as soon as possible. In making those claims, they were echoing sentiments expressed by their boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who declared at a news conference last month, “Abrego Garcia has landed in the United States to face justice.”
But recent developments suggest that the department is not quite as committed to pursuing the prosecution as it initially seemed. Indeed, if Mr. Abrego Garcia was returned from El Salvador to confront “American justice,” as Ms. Bondi put it, he might not actually be in the country long enough to face it.
In a pair of court hearings this week, Justice Department lawyers said that they would press forward with the case, but only on one condition: that Mr. Abrego Garcia remained in custody while he awaited trial. If he were freed on bail, they said, they would scrap the idea of trying him altogether and turn him over to immigration officials for immediate deportation.
That plan of action revealed a lot about the Justice Department’s priorities.
Typically, prosecutors go through the trouble of convening grand juries and seeking indictments because they want to obtain guilty verdicts against defendants. But in Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case, the administration appears to be primarily concerned with ensuring — whether through the courts or through immigration proceedings — that a man it has described as a “dangerous illegal immigrant” never walks free on U.S. soil.
“If this case is as meritorious as the attorney general has said, then you would think they would want to see it through to trial and conviction so that they could hold him accountable for his crimes,” said Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Detroit who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. “The idea that they may seek to deport him if they don’t get their way at the detention stage is remarkable.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case is hardly the first in which the Justice Department under Mr. Trump has faced allegations of using the courts to achieve its political objectives.
In February, Danielle R. Sassoon, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, accused senior department officials of effectively offering a corrupt quid pro quo to Mayor Eric Adams of New York. The officials, Ms. Sassoon maintained, had agreed to drop charges against Mr. Adams in exchange for his cooperation in enforcing President Trump’s immigration policies.
One month later, the Justice Department started to make good on a separate deal that the administration had reached with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Under that arrangement, the White House paid El Salvador millions of dollars to house deported immigrants in its prison system, adding a sweetener at Mr. Bukele’s request: the return to his country of top leaders in the violent street gang MS-13, some of whom had knowledge of his corrupt relations with the group.
In Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case, it initially seemed as if the Justice Department, which is handling the criminal case, was at odds with the Department of Homeland Security, which will oversee a second deportation, should it come to that.
After all, prosecutors said last month that while they wanted to take the case to trial, they might not be able to stop Homeland Security officials from removing Mr. Abrego Garcia again if he were released from criminal custody.
On Monday, however, Jonathan Guynn, a lawyer for the Justice Department, told the judge presiding over Mr. Abrego Garcia’s civil case in Maryland that the two agencies sought the same the goal — keeping the defendant off the streets — albeit by different means.
“The U.S. attorney’s office and D.H.S., despite the representation of the plaintiffs and certain folks in the media, they are not working at cross purposes with one another,” Mr. Guynn said to Judge Paula Xinis. “They are both working toward the same purpose of protecting the United States public from a manifestly dangerous illegal alien.”
That assertion was somewhat difficult to square with a recent finding by a federal magistrate judge in Tennessee that Mr. Abrego Garcia did not, in fact, present a danger to the public. The magistrate judge, Barbara D. Holmes, came to that conclusion in an order she issued last month saying that the defendant should be freed as his prosecution on charges of smuggling illegal immigrants moves forward.
The Justice Department has already asked the district judge who is handling the case to reconsider Judge Holmes’s ruling, and he intends to do so at a hearing in Nashville on Wednesday. If that judge, Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., agrees with Judge Holmes, then Mr. Abrego Garcia will be released — almost certainly into the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which will then begin the process of re-deporting him.
Hoping to stop a second speedy expulsion, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers appeared before Judge Xinis in Maryland twice this week, asking her for an order that would at least provide them with an opportunity to challenge his removal from the country.
On Thursday, at the end of the second hearing, Judge Xinis said she was inclined to issue an order that would keep Mr. Abrego Garcia from being re-deported for at least two days after his transfer from criminal custody to I.C.E. Such an order, she explained, would give her time to consider the government’s plans.
The complexities of those plans were on display on Wednesday night when the Justice Department proposed a deal to Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers in an effort to allay their concerns. The department offered in writing not to send him back to El Salvador without first returning to court to undo the initial order that should have prohibited him from being deported to that country in the first place.
Department lawyers also vowed that if the administration tried to expel him to a third country, it would follow the procedures that were effectively endorsed by the Supreme Court in a ruling last week.
Under those procedures, the administration can expel immigrants to a country not their own if they receive some assurance from the country that people will not be persecuted or tortured there. Immigrants can challenge their removal if they fear that they might suffer harm, immigration officials say, but the government would ultimately determine whether their fears were justified.
At the hearing on Thursday, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers rejected that offer, saying they believed that the procedures left room for the administration to deport their client to a third country like South Sudan without much notice or opportunity to contest his expulsion.
“We think that’s just the state of the law,” Andrew Rossman, one of the lawyers, said.
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.
Minho Kim covers breaking news and climate change for The Times. He is based in Washington.
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