(Reuters) -Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported from Maryland to El Salvador by the Trump administration, is on his way back to the U.S. to face criminal charges, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday.
Abrego Garcia will face charges for allegedly transporting undocumented migrants within the U.S., ABC reported earlier. The report said the charges had been filed under seal in Tennessee last month, well after Abrego Garcia’s March 15 deportation.
In a statement, Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, Andrew Rossman, said it would now be up to the U.S. judicial system to ensure he received due process.
“Today’s action proves what we’ve known all along — that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so,” said Rossman, a partner at law firm Quinn Emanuel.
Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador, despite an immigration judge’s 2019 order granting him protection from deportation to El Salvador after finding he was likely to be persecuted by gangs if returned there, court records show.
Critics of President Donald Trump pointed to the erroneous deportation as an example of the excesses of the Republican president’s aggressive approach to stepping up deportations.
Officials countered by alleging that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang. His lawyers have denied that Abrego Garcia was a member of the gang and said he had not been charged with or convicted of any crime.
His case has also become a flash point for escalating tensions between the executive branch and the judiciary, which has ruled against a number of Trump’s policies. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, with liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor saying the government had cited no basis for what she called his “warrantless arrest.”
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis has since opened a probe into what, if anything, the Trump administration has done to secure his return, after his lawyers accused officials of stonewalling their requests for information.
(Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones and Luc Cohen; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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