DOJ Discovers It CAN Actually Bring Abrego Garcia Back… To Face Sketchy, Trumped Up Criminal Charges
The most telling detail in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga isn't what the DOJ is claiming - it's what a federal prosecutor refused to do. Ben Schrader, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Nashville and chief of the criminal division, abruptly resigned rather than put his name on the indictment the Trump administration cobbled together to justify their illegal deportation of a man courts had barred the US from sending to El Salvador.
That should tell you everything about the quality of this case." But let's walk through exactly how the DOJ manufactured criminal charges to cover up their own constitutional violation.
After months of claiming it was impossible" to bring Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador - where they illegally shipped him, despite a court order, due to an administrative error" - they have now brought him back.
For months they resisted doing so, as everyone realized it would mean admitting the Trump administration's aggressive immigration program made mistakes. So the administration pivoted: they fired the DOJ lawyer who had initially admitted that it was a mistake to deport him, and began claiming that Abrego Garcia was obviously a terrible criminal, a leader" of the MS-13 gang, and a human trafficker." The US government then began searching high and low for literally anything they could use to try to justify those claims about him, so they could falsely pretend that they were correct in shipping him out of the country.
The best they can do was... finding a 2022 traffic stop.
In that stop, Abrego Garcia was driving a van with eight passengers from Texas to Maryland - construction workers, he said, being transported between job sites. The officers at the time found nothing worth charging. They didn't even cite him for speeding.
Difficult to see that as evidence of anything horrible.
But desperate times call for desperate measures. And the Trump administration desperately needed something. So it appears the DOJ used that non-incident to secretly indict Abrego Garcia on two counts of transporting" undocumented workers. That indictment was unsealed today, along with the announcement that Abrego Garcia was being brought back to the US to face those criminal charges.
Oh, so they could bring him back...
This proves that the administration has been lying, repeatedly, in claiming that they had no control over him and couldn't bring him back.
Remember: Trump himself admitted multiple times that he could get Abrego Garcia back. Meanwhile, AG Pam Bondi was insisting in public that Abrego Garcia would never return to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was even more definitive: there is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again."
Kristi Noem less than a month ago: "There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again."(No matter what happens, bringing him back to the US is a climbdown for the administration)
All proven false. Today, Bondi tried to claim this was different because they presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant." But that only proves the lie - there was never anything stopping them from making that request. They just chose not to, while claiming it was impossible.
El Salvador readily agreed to the request - exactly as everyone knew they would, despite Salvadoran President Bukele's claims that it was preposterous" to even think of returning him as he would have to smuggle a terrorist" into the US.
Turns out all of that was theater.
We've seen this playbook trotted out multiple times: whenever someone is denied due process, we hear about how awful they are, how violent, how dangerous, as if that means they don't deserve due process. But that's garbage: everyone deserves due process, because without it, there's simply no way to know for sure that they are all those things anyone is claiming.
The new criminal indictment
It's now clear that the DOJ went on a fishing expedition to find anything they could possibly dig up to pin on Abrego Garcia. The evidence was so weak that, according to ABC News, the local DOJ prosecutor resigned rather than put his name on the filings:
The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader's decision told ABC News. Schrader's resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.
Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.
When experienced federal prosecutors walk away from cases because they believe they're politically motivated, that tells you everything about the integrity of the charges.
But the DOJ pressed forward anyway, transforming a routine traffic stop into something much grander. In their detention motion, two years after police found nothing worth citing, the government now claims:
Over the past nine years, the defendant has played a significant role in an undocumented alien smuggling ring that has resulted in thousands of undocumented aliens being illegally transported into and throughout the United States, including members and associates of La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13"), a recently designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, as well as unaccompanied minor children
This represents a remarkable evolution in the government's case. In 2022: not worth a speeding ticket. In 2025: international human trafficking kingpin.
At today's press conference about this, Pam Bondi also appeared to accuse Abrego Garcia of being a child-groomer" and a murderer. When reporters pointed out that the indictment says nothing about such things, she got angry, insisted he's really bad, and then ended the press conference abruptly.
Everything is backwards
Here, the entire process has been backwards:
The Promise: Rigorous deportation processes targeting only dangerous criminals. Once deported, impossible to bring anyone back.
The Reality: They accidentally shipped someone with no criminal record to El Salvador against a court order barring him from being shipped there. Then, they were able to easily bring him back two and a half months later, as soon as they asked, but only after they scraped together a very weak looking indictment to try to turn him into a criminal.
That's not protecting Americans from violent criminals. It's turning people into criminals to justify a monumental fuckup and human rights violation.