The Trump administration has retrieved Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who was deported to El Salvador after he came to the country illegally in 2012. The Justice Department last week indicted him for a series of offenses related to human smuggling.
Abrego Garcia’s case raised controversy when the Trump administration transported him to El Salvador, with a group of other illegal immigrants, even though a judge had issued a withholding of removal order shielding him from deportation years ago.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the charges against Abrego Garcia on Friday, saying that “upon completion of his sentence, we anticipate that he will be returned to his home country of El Salvador.”
The indictment lists several charges against the suspect, including one count of conspiracy to commit alien smuggling and multiple counts of transporting and harboring illegal immigrants. Court documents paint a picture of an expansive criminal enterprise in which Abrego Garcia allegedly played a critical role.
The conspiracy to smuggle and transport aliens count is the backbone of the government’s case against the defendant, claiming he took part in a broad, multi-year operation to assist illegal immigrants in eluding the authorities.
“Beginning in or around 2016, and continuing through the date of this indictment… the defendant knowingly and unlawfully conspired with others… to bring and attempt to bring aliens into the United States… in violation of law,” the indictment reads, further claiming that the purpose “was to financially enrich the defendant and his co-conspirators through the unlawful transportation and harboring of undocumented aliens.”
The court documents state that Abrego Garcia and his alleged co-conspirators “used various means of communication including mobile phones and encrypted messaging applications.”
The defendant and his partners allegedly “transported undocumented aliens in vehicles not equipped for safe transport, including children without car seats and passengers hidden beneath blankets or luggage.”
Prosecutors added: “Each act of transportation was conducted with the knowledge that the individuals being moved had entered the United States unlawfully and that the journey posed significant physical risk to those being smuggled.”
The defendant allegedly "routinely took the cellular phones of the undocumented aliens they transported within the United States, returning them only at the end of the trip." This was to prevent them from contacting anyone else while they were being transported.
In all, the indictment claims Abrego Garcia made "more than 100 trips between Texas, Maryland, and other states."
Abrego Garcia is alleged to have been a central organizer within the smuggling network. He allegedly maintained contact with suppliers in Central America, coordinated the use of vehicles, recruited drivers, and planned out routing through states such as Texas, Tennessee, and several others.
The documents refer to an incident captured on police bodycam footage in which Abrego Garcia allegedly misled law enforcement during a November 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee. Prosecutors say he was driving an SUV registered to a co-conspirator and a convicted human smuggler. He told officers that he and the nine Hispanic males in the vehicle had spent two weeks working construction in St. Louis.
However, the officers were suspicious because they did not have tools or luggage in the vehicle. Cellphone location data and License Plate Reader hits showed that Garcia was in Texas earlier that morning — not in St. Louis.
The Justice Department claims Abrego Garcia leveraged his affiliation with the MS-13 street gang, which the federal government designated as a terrorist organization, to smuggle gang members into the US. It alleges that about 20 to 30 percent of those the defendant allegedly smuggled were MS-13 members. However, he is not being charged for being a member of the gang.
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and CC-1 regularly required the undocumented aliens they transported to pay them in cash for facilitating their transport throughout the United States. The MS-13 members and associates transported by CC-2 refused to pay CC-2 for his transportation services, but the MS-13 members and associates transported by Abrego Garcia generally treated him with respect and paid him for his services. Co-conspirators later transferred, via Western Union and other means, at least some of this money—derived from the unlawful transportation—back to other co-conspirators in foreign countries such as Mexico and Guatemala, as part of the wider alien smuggling operation.
The indictment says Abrego Garcia “transported unaccompanied minor children, placing them in unsafe conditions to maximize profit and avoid detection by authorities.”
Abrego Garcia recklessly endangered human lives by smuggling them in dangerously overcrowded vehicles and driving them up to 18 hours at a time with little rest, according to the Justice Department. The documents hint at the possibility that he engaged in physical and sexual abuse with those he was allegedly smuggling, but they give no details about this, nor is he being charged with these offenses.