Judge tosses – A federal judge in Tennessee on Friday dismissed federal human-smuggling charges against Salvadoran man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, finding the Justice Department’s prosecution was vindictive and that prosecutors failed to rebut that presumption. The case began afte
By Friday morning, the courtroom in Tennessee was already full of the details that made the case impossible to dismiss as mere paperwork.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia. a Salvadoran man who said he was mistakenly deported after the Trump administration removed him last year. faced federal charges accusing him of human smuggling. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw tossed the indictment. granting Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss on the ground that the Justice Department’s prosecution was vindictive.
Crenshaw’s decision didn’t come as a surprise to those tracking the legal fight closely—he had already ruled that Abrego Garcia showed the prosecution may be vindictive. After that, it fell to prosecutors to rebut the presumption. In his ruling Friday, the judge concluded that the government failed to meet that burden.
For Abrego Garcia, the dismissal is described as a massive victory. His immigration case had become a flashpoint during President Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown. and the criminal charges that followed his deportation to El Salvador only deepened the sense that the legal system was moving in two directions at once.
Abrego Garcia had been charged last year with two counts of human smuggling tied to a November 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee. State Highway Patrol pulled him over, and officials found numerous people in his vehicle. He pleaded not guilty.
The timeline took a sharp turn in 2025. Abrego Garcia was removed from the U.S. in March 2025 and flown to El Salvador, where he was initially held at a notorious supermax prison. But an immigration judge had granted Abrego Garcia a legal status forbidding immigration authorities from deporting him to his home country. A Trump administration official later acknowledged that removing him to El Salvador was a mistake.
Abrego Garcia then pushed back through the courts. He filed a civil lawsuit in Maryland challenging his deportation. and in April 2025 a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the U.S. The Department of Homeland Security resisted doing so for months before eventually returning him to face criminal charges.
As those cases unfolded, Abrego Garcia was held on separate occasions by federal authorities in Tennessee and immigration officials in Maryland. For several months, he remained out of immigration custody while both his civil and criminal matters moved forward.
In court Friday. Crenshaw laid out why he believed the Justice Department’s shift from not prosecuting to prosecuting crossed a line. “The Court does not reach its conclusion lightly,” Crenshaw wrote. He said the objective evidence showed that. absent Abrego Garcia’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador. the government would not have brought the prosecution. He added that the Executive Branch closed its investigation on the November 2022 traffic stop. and that only after Abrego Garcia succeeded in vindicating his rights did the Executive Branch reopen that investigation.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the dismissal.
The defense case centered on retaliation—arguing that Abrego Garcia was targeted because of the civil lawsuit that successfully challenged his deportation to El Salvador. During a nearly six-hour hearing in February. his attorneys questioned two government witnesses about when the Justice Department decided to move to indict him. and whether anyone at the White House. the Justice Department. or the Department of Homeland Security was directly involved in those discussions.
Robert McGuire, the U.S. attorney who was then leading the prosecution. told the court he decided to bring charges years after the initial traffic stop because “the evidence pointed to Abrego Garcia having committed a crime.” McGuire insisted it was his decision to prosecute Abrego Garcia and no one else’s. saying no one instructed him to do so or directed him to seek an indictment.
But Abrego Garcia’s legal team pointed to internal emails from a high-level Justice Department official. Those messages. the defense said. suggested there was significant interest in charging Abrego Garcia after he challenged his deportation—including one that referred to the case as a “top priority.”.
Crenshaw’s ruling weighed that record carefully. He said he found “insufficient evidence of actual vindictiveness,” but still concluded that “the Government has failed to rebut the presumption of vindictiveness.”
The judge also focused on what the record did not explain—why the government’s actions changed after the deportation fight. The record. Crenshaw said. “does not explain the Government’s change in position to remove Abrego and not prosecute him to then prosecute and not remove him.” He wrote that there was a “retaliatory taint” that helped spark the renewed investigation into Abrego Garcia.
Crenshaw wrote that the “objective evidence” came close to showing that “but for Abrego’s lawsuit. ” the Justice Department would not have indicted him. He said statements by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and the involvement of Aakash Singh. an associate deputy attorney general. “directly tie Main Justice” to reopening the investigation into the 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee in response to Abrego Garcia’s successful challenge of his deportation. Blanche is now the acting attorney general.
Crenshaw added that the “objective credible evidence shows that Main Justice was involved in the investigation before McGuire.” He said Singh’s involvement “touched on everything from the timing of the indictment to the substance of the potential charges.”
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