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Kilmer Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man whose false deportation to El Salvador has become a long-term battle over a legitimate process and testament, returned to the United States to face allegations of smuggling people in Tennessee, appeared in federal court on Friday.
Attorney General Pam Bondy said at a press conference Friday that he had landed “to face justice.”
Abrego Garcia, 29, was named in a charge accusing him of transporting people of people that are not legal in the United States. The two-count indictment, sealed by a Tennessee court last month, alleges that Abrego Garcia has been involved in the plot for more than nine years, moving people deeper into the country from Texas.
The indictment alleges that the people transported include members of the MS-13 gang, and that he worked with the conspirators.
Wearing a beige button-down shirt, jeans and hiking boots, Abrego Garcia was asked by a federal judge in Nashville on Friday afternoon if he understood the issue, and via an interpreter, he replied, “Yes, I understand.”
An arrest and detention hearing is scheduled for June 13th. Abrego Garcia maintains federal custody. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes rejected his official defense counsel’s request that he be released soon.
Prosecutors argue he should be detained, and they say he is a flight risk. In the detention memo, they said testimony at the trial showed that he “carries around 50 undocumented aliens per month over several years.”
Prosecutors added that he faces up to 10 years’ prison terms for “each alien” he transported.
The Justice Department said Abrego Garcia will use his position in MS-13 to “promote his criminal conduct.” President Donald Trump told reporters Friday that he should never have been returned, and pointed to the discovery of the Great Jury.
“This was his full-time job, not a contractor,” Bondy said. “He was a human, child and female smuggler. He has traveled more than 100 times.
Simon Sandoval Moshenberg, Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, said bringing him back for the prosecution was “a abuse of power, not justice.”
“The government has vanished Kilmer to a foreign prison in violation of court orders,” Sandoval Morshenberg said in a statement. “Now after months of delays and secrets, they’re bringing him back to indict him rather than correcting the error, which shows they’ve been playing the game in court the whole time.
After the DOJ announced that Kilmer Abrego Garcia had been returned to the US and charged with undocumented transport of immigrants, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers vowed to fight the allegations fiercely.
The indictments allege that from 2016 to 2025, Abrego Garcia and others conspired to illegally bring immigrants to the United States, including Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Ecuador, across the Texas-Mexican border.
After crossing the border, Abrego Garcia and his co-conspirators “picked up undocumented aliens in the Houston, Texas area,” the accusations alleges. The pair has since reportedly “promote the illegal presence of aliens in the United States to transport undocumented aliens from Texas to other parts of the United States,” the accusations said.
In the indictment, the government said Abrego Garcia and six other unnamed and unnamed co-conspirators communicated using cell phones and social media to illegally transport undocumented migrants.
They claim that Abrego Garcia will hold the cell phones of people he is transporting in the United States and return them at the end of the trip.
The indictment also alleges that Abrego Garcia and other conspirators will reconfigure the vehicles to transport migrants, and that the child will travel to the floorboards. On one occasion, the Tennessee Highway Patrol stopped Abrego Garcia while driving through the suburbs in “the third row of aftermarket seats located where there was a cargo area occupied by undocumented passengers.”
The government further alleged that Abrego Garcia and his co-conspirators collected financial payments from immigrants and transferred funds to each other to hide the origins of the payments. The indictment alleges that he was involved in transporting 150 migrants in a tractor trailer overturned in Mexico, killing 50 people and injuring others.
Maryland Rep. Jamie Ruskin, who was a resident of Abrego Garcia, pointed out that he was deported on March 15, saying it was “about time.”
“They obviously want to make this about whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy, but that’s not a moral question,” Ruskin told CNN. “It’s a legal question. It’s a constitutional question: whether the government can pick up people and take them abroad.”
Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sula, claims he has not been involved in criminal activity.
“Kilmer was engaged in construction and sometimes transported groups of workers between employment sites, so he would have been pulled while driving with others in the vehicle,” his wife said in a statement. “He was not charged with a crime or was not cited for fraud.”
Family lawyer Chris Newman said Friday that the Trump administration had been engaged in a “disinformation campaign, honor loss to Kilmer and his family” for several months.
“Kilmer will finally get his day in court,” Newman said.
The Trump administration has long-standingly released various allegations against Abrego Garcia in response to his deportation and court requests. Abrego Garcia was taken home from work in Baltimore when he got in the car on March 12th, when he was detained in several different facilities.
In April, a federal judge and the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the federal government to promote Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, but the administration limped and resisted. Sometimes the administration argued that his return was left to President Naibe Buquere of Salvador. Naive Bukele wrote on Friday that he “of course not rejected” the Trump administration’s request after refusing to send him back.
Bondi said the US presented an arrest warrant to El Salvador, “they agreed to send him back.”
Kilmer Abrego Garcia, a sheet metal worker in Maryland, was illegally deported to an infamous prison in El Salvador. Trump administration officials emphasized that he is a citizen of El Salvador and that the United States has no say in his future.
The Trump administration previously agreed to pay $6 million to El Salvador and imprison around 300 people who claimed to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang for a year.
The Trump administration previously agreed to pay $6 million to El Salvador and imprison around 300 people who claimed to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang for a year.
US officials accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of Salvador’s gang MS-13, giving it as a reason to expel him, despite preventing the judge’s orders from 2019 from being sent to his home country.
He was taken to the infamous Cecot prison in El Salvador, known for its harsh and brutal circumstances. Government lawyers said he was taken there as a result of “mismanagement.”
Abrego Garcia’s wife said she had no idea he was in the El Salvador prison until she recognized him in a video of the detainee filmed from a plane posted by Buquere.
The Centre for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) is a Megaprison located in Tecolca, El Salvador.
The Supreme Court held in April that the removal of Abrego Garcia was “illegal” and that the administration’s judge’s order to promote his return was appropriate.
As demands for his return intensified, the administration doubled by continuing to imprison him in El Salvador.
Despite the orders to bring him back, the administration has repeatedly stood in its position, raising concerns about the rebellion of the judicial division and threats of light emptying from the bench.
A federal judge last week ordered the Trump administration to give hundreds of migrants at CECOT prisons in El Salvador the opportunity to challenge them to detain and remove them.
Newman, Abrego Garcia’s family lawyer, said Abrego Garcia had expressed doubts about the charges.
“We have been concerned for some time that either the Trump administration or the Bukell administration would file charges against him to fill in violation of their right to demonstrate that they are engaged,” he said.
Julia Ainsley of NBC News contributed.
This story first appeared on nbcnews.com. More from NBC News:
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