The administration is cutting deals with felons, driving out federal prosecutors, and threatening to abandon its criminal case—all to avoid admitting error.
The Trump administration’s long, belabored campaign to prove that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a gang leader, a terrorist, and an all-around bad guy—not a wrongfully deported Maryland man—has produced some extraordinary legal maneuvers. The administration fought Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador all the way to the Supreme Court, lost, and eventually brought him back to the United States to slap him with criminal charges it had started investigating after it had already sent him to a foreign prison.
But with that criminal case off to a shaky start, the administration is threatening to deport Abrego Garcia again—this time to a country other than his native El Salvador—because the judge has ordered his release while the trial is pending. Having spent months trying to gather evidence against Abrego Garcia, the administration is suggesting it may walk away from it all by sending him to Mexico, Guatemala, or another nation willing to take him.
The threat of Abrego Garcia’s imminent re-deportation prompted his attorneys to take the extraordinary step today of asking a district court to delay their client’s release and keep him locked up for several more weeks to protect him from ICE. “The irony of this request is not lost on anyone,” his attorneys told the court. “In a just world, he would not seek to prolong his detention further.” The lawyers accused the government of pretending to want Abrego Garcia to face “American justice,” while really only wanting to “convict him in the court of public opinion.”
The head-spinning developments of the past several days add to the administration’s running tab in a case that has challenged its determination to admit no wrongdoing. The case has produced nearly 57,000 pages of documents; ended the Department of Justice careers of one, perhaps two prosecutors; and prompted the Trump administration to cut deals with convicted felons that protect them from deportation in exchange for testimony.
Some of the most remarkable accommodations appear in the transcript of a June 13 pretrial hearing for Abrego Garcia in Tennessee, where the government is trying to convict him of human smuggling. Under cross-examination by defense attorneys, the government’s lead investigator, the Department of Homeland Security agent Peter Joseph, told the court that his primary cooperating witness—the source of the most damning testimony—is a twice-convicted felon who had been previously deported five times.
Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes, who was presiding over the hearing, did a double take. “Sorry. Deported how many times?” she asked.
Joseph, who confirmed the total, said the cooperator has been moved out of prison to a halfway house and is now awaiting a U.S. work permit. He told the court that a second cooperating witness is seeking similar inducements from the government.
Trump and his top officials have said for months that their mass-deportation campaign would prioritize the swift removal of criminals from the United States. But in its effort to punish Abrego Garcia—who does not have a criminal record—the administration is protecting convicted felons from deportation.
Other costs include ending the 15-year career of a Department of Justice attorney, Erez Reuveni, who filed a whistleblower claim with Congress this week alleging that he was fired for refusing to go along with unsubstantiated claims, pushed by the White House, that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 gang leader and a terrorist.
When Reuveni’s superiors told him to sign a legal brief making those claims, he refused, saying he “didn’t sign up to lie” when he became a federal prosecutor. He was suspended seven hours later and fired on April 11.
Reuveni’s career may not be the only DOJ casualty. Another federal prosecutor, Ben Schrader, the head of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville, submitted his resignation last month when the government brought Abrego Garcia there to face charges. Schrader, who declined to comment and has not discussed his departure publicly, wrote in a LinkedIn post that “the only job description I’ve ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.”
As Reuveni and others have pointed out, ICE officials initially recognized that Abrego Garcia had been deported on March 15 due to an “administrative error.
