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Abrego Garcia Lawyers Question Evidence From Key Witness in Criminal Case

July 16, 2025
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Abrego Garcia Lawyers Question Evidence From Key Witness in Criminal Case
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Lawyers for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant who was wrongfully expelled to El Salvador in March, poked holes on Wednesday in some of the evidence supporting the charges that were used to bring him back to face trial in the United States.

The efforts by the lawyers were largely focused on chipping away at the accounts of a group of witnesses who have come forward in recent weeks to accuse Mr. Abrego Garcia of having taken part in a nearly decadelong conspiracy to smuggle illegal immigrants as a member of the violent street gang MS-13.

Appearing in court Wednesday, the lawyers also questioned the federal agent who led the inquiry into Mr. Abrego Garcia, getting him to acknowledge on the stand that while he had personally spoken with the government’s star witness in the case, he had never looked at three previous — and less incriminating — interviews conducted by other investigators.

All of this took place at a hearing in Federal District Court in Nashville intended to determine whether Mr. Abrego Garcia should be freed from criminal custody as he awaits trial. While a federal magistrate judge has already determined that he should go free, finding that he was neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community, the district judge overseeing the case, Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., was asked by the government to revisit that decision.

Judge Crenshaw said he planned to make his own decision next week; how he rules will greatly affect Mr. Abrego Garcia’s future.

In a remarkable admission, the Justice Department said last week that it intends to push forward with prosecuting Mr. Abrego Garcia only if the judge keeps him locked up as he awaits trial. If Mr. Abrego Garcia is released, department lawyers have suggested that the charges will likely be dropped and he will be turned over to immigration officials for immediate deportation.

At the hearing in Nashville, Judge Crenshaw, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said he did not want to go down “the rabbit hole” of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s potential re-expulsion from the country, preferring to stick to narrower question of whether the defendant should be released on bail.

Still, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers are concerned enough that the Trump administration might drop the charges and move at once to re-deport him that they have asked the judge overseeing his original wrongful deportation case to issue a new order protecting him from being hastily removed from the country again.

That judge, Paula Xinis, said last week that she planned to issue such an order before the hearing on Wednesday in front of Judge Crenshaw. But no order was handed down yet.

The back-and-forth in court in Nashville on Wednesday indicated just how intertwined Mr. Abrego Garcia’s criminal case has become with the initial civil case in which his lawyers sought to return him from El Salvador.

By bringing Mr. Abrego Garcia back to U.S. soil to face criminal charges, the Trump administration was able to flex its law-and-order muscles while avoiding a potentially damaging finding by Judge Xinis that it had violated her order to free him from Salvadoran custody.

The administration’s apparent willingness to re-deport Mr. Abrego Garcia if he is eventually released by Judge Crenshaw also suggests that it was never quite as committed to the criminal case as it said it was.

What happened in court on Wednesday, though, was focused on the narrower question of the government’s evidence against Mr. Abrego Garcia.

In questioning the lead investigator, Peter Joseph, Sean Hecker, one of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, drove straight at one of the government’s central allegations: that the defendant was working as a member of MS-13 when he made dozens of immigrant smuggling runs from Texas to the East Coast over the past several years.

Mr. Hecker got Agent Joseph to acknowledge that he had never looked at three initial interviews with the government’s star witness, Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, in which he told investigators there were no obvious signs that Mr. Abrego Garcia belonged to the gang. It was not until a fourth interview, conducted by Agent Joseph personally, that Mr. Hernandez Reyes suddenly changed course, asserting that asking questions about someone’s gang affiliations could be dangerous.

Agent Joseph reacted defensively on the stand when Mr. Hecker pointed out that those remarks had never appeared in a report he had written about his interview with the witness.

“I’m by no means making it up,” the agent said.

Mr. Hecker also got Agent Joseph to acknowledge that it was “atypical” that Mr. Hernandez Reyes — who had been convicted of multiple felonies and was deported five times from the United States only to return each time — had been released to a halfway house after agreeing to cooperate with the government’s investigation of Mr. Abrego Garcia.

Moreover, Mr. Hecker noted that two of the government’s other chief witnesses had close ties to Mr. Hernandez Reyes. One was his son and another had been in long-term romantic relationship with him.

The tightness of their bonds prompted Judge Crenshaw to pose his own question of Agent Joseph.

“Is there any reason to believe those three had gotten together on their testimony?” the judge asked.

Agent Joseph said there was not, but seemed to hedge his bets.

“It’s always possible, of course,” he added. “They’re family.”

At one point, Mr. Hecker brought up an unusual development that has loomed over the case since its inception: one of the top prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office that filed the charges against Mr. Abrego Garcia, Ben Schrader, had quit his job, just as the indictment was returned.

Agent Joseph, under questioning by Mr. Hecker, said that Mr. Schrader had attended the interview with Mr. Hernandez Reyes in which the witness had suddenly — and after several denials — suggested that Mr. Abrego Garcia might in fact have belonged to MS-13.

Mr. Schrader never took part in another witness interview and left his post weeks later.

Agent Joseph said he did not know why.

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 Abrego Garcia Lawyers Question Evidence From Key Witness in Criminal Case appeared first on New York Times.

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