Nearly a year later, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is still battling for his freedom. The Salvadoran man, who is married with children to a U.S. citizen, was wrongly deported to a prison in his home country in March 2025 alongside more than 200 other Venezuelan and Salvadoran men.
Thursday, Abrego Garcia appeared in court alongside his family and legal team to battle a criminal case brought against him after the Supreme Court ruled that the Maryland father needed to be returned home.
Despite being brought back to America in June 2025, a target seemingly appeared on his back. Almost immediately, the deportation-focused administration pulled a 2022 criminal case out of its pocket and decided to prosecute the 31-year-old man.
The administration leaned on a Tennessee traffic stop to claim that the exchange was grounds for human smuggling charges. However, with bodycam footage to back it up, Abrego Garcia was let go with a warning at the time.
The justice department’s approach raised some eyebrows, however, and has laid the groundwork for Abrego Garcia’s call to have his case dismissed.
Amid the legal back and forth, Abrego Garcia was nearly deported to Uganda as well as Costa Rica.
Even U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw, who is overseeing the case, has called the administration’s approach “vindictive.”
“Cases do not magically appear on the desks of prosecutors,” Crenshaw wrote in October. “The motivations of the people who place the file on the prosecutor’s desk are highly relevant.”
Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent in Charge Rana Saoud argued in court Thursday that the case "just kept getting stronger."
“If the facts did not add up, we would have ceased to move forward,” she added.
Then again, a vindictive tone has been set across the Trump administration since the start of the president’s second term.
In the ongoing case of the men sent to El Salvador’s terrorism confinement center, CECOT, even the men who were left behind after Abrego Garcia’s return have been facing their own wrath from Trump’s team.
Related | Trump deported them, a judge ordered them back—but it’s not so simple
After being released from the prison in a July 2025 prisoner swap, the ACLU has been battling it out with the Department of Homeland Security to return the men—who the Trump administration has claimed to be Tren de Aragua gang members—so they can prove their innocence. The civil rights litigation group has been working overtime to give the Venezuelan men the due process they were initially denied when sent to the prison in the first place.
Earlier this month, Judge James Boasberg ruled that the administration has to provide return flights for Venezuelan men residing outside of their home country for the opportunity to prove their innocence.
However, some are looking at the treatment they and many others endured, and saying no thanks—at least for now.
As for Abrego Garcia, with familial roots on the East Coast, his fight continues in the courts to stay in America.
Alix Breeden February 27, 2026 at 12:30AM From Daily Kos
0 Comments