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The Justice Department asked a federal appeals court on Monday to reinstate the criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man wrongfully deported by the Trump administration last year, by reversing a lower court order that found them to be vindictive in nature.
In May, a federal judge in Tennessee dismissed a criminal indictment against Abrego Garcia, who had been accused by federal prosecutors of smuggling immigrants in the U.S. illegally. The judge found that the Justice Department prosecuted Abrego Garcia in retaliation for his efforts to challenge his wrongful deportation to El Salvador last year.
In a filing Monday before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, the Justice Department denied that the prosecution was vindictive, arguing it had “multiple legitimate bases to prosecute” Abrego Garcia.
“The decision to seek an indictment against Abrego Garcia for human smuggling was made by career prosecutors based on the evidence, the law, and their firm belief that there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Abrego Garcia had committed the offenses charged,” the Justice Department said in a news release.
The Justice Department argued that the court order from May “marks a dramatic expansion of the power of courts to dismiss serious criminal charges based on subjective assessments of a prosecutor’s motivations.”
In a statement to CBS News, Abrego Garcia’s defense team called the Justice Department’s news release “flat wrong,” saying that “the indictment and prosecution of Abrego Garcia was, in fact, vindictive; the evidence before the district court established just that; and the proof was clear notwithstanding the DOJ’s refusal to call the actual decision makers, including AG [Todd] Blanche, to testify under oath.”
“This case was initiated vindictively and on instructions from the White House after our client successfully won his Supreme Court case,” his defense team added.
Abrego Garcia was charged last year with two counts of human smuggling stemming from a November 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, where he was pulled over by state Highway Patrol and was found to have numerous people in his vehicle. He had pleaded not guilty.
Abrego Garcia is also involved in a separate federal court case in Maryland around the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to deport him. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has said it is seeking to deport him to the African nation of Liberia, but a federal judge has blocked that for now.
