Kilmar Abrego Garcia Was Never Coming Back. Then He Did.

After insisting again and again that they would not bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States, Trump-administration officials flew the 29-year-old Maryland man back from El Salvador today to face a grand-jury criminal indictment in Tennessee.

Abrego Garcia’s return doesn’t mean he can go free. He now faces federal charges for human trafficking, according to the indictment unsealed today, and the Trump administration will get its opportunity to prove what it has long alleged about Abrego Garcia’s membership in the gang MS-13. Even if prosecutors fail to convict him, the government could attempt to deport him to a third country—just not back to El Salvador.

But by bringing him back to the United States, the Trump administration has climbed down from the court-defying pedestal where Vice President J. D. Vance, the adviser Stephen Miller, and Cabinet officials perched for months, claiming that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was not, in fact, a mistake, and that he would never be allowed to set foot in the country again. Their obstinacy led to warnings of a constitutional crisis.

Abrego Garcia’s wife, a U.S. citizen, sued the government in March after he was deported to his native country in violation of a 2019 court order protecting him from being sent back to face likely harm. U.S. officials initially acknowledged that they’d made an “administrative error,” then shrugged and said that the matter was out of their hands.

White House officials remained dug in even as the Supreme Court ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. “There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified to lawmakers last month.

Now, by bringing Abrego Garcia back to face criminal charges, the administration can quiet the constitutional concerns about his due-process rights and lay out the evidence it claims to possess showing that he is not a benign sheet-metal worker and devoted father but a gang leader and human trafficker. Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters that Abrego Garcia “played a significant role in an alien-smuggling ring.” The criminal charges, filed in the Middle District of Tennessee, allege that Abrego Garcia participated in a nine-year conspiracy that moved thousands of people to destinations across the United States and totaled more than 100 trips. The indictment also accuses him of gun running and drug smuggling.

According to ABC News, which first reported on Abrego Garcia’s return and the trafficking charges, the chief of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville resigned after the indictment was filed. The attorney, Ben Schrader, declined to comment when I reached out to him this evening.

Senator Chris Van Hollen, who traveled to El Salvador in April and was allowed by the country’s authorities to meet with Abrego Garcia, said in a statement that the administration has “finally relented to our demands for compliance with court orders and with the due process rights afforded to everyone in the United States.”

“As I have repeatedly said, this is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights—and the rights of all,” Van Hollen said in the statement. “The Administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”

Read: An ‘administrative error’ sends a Maryland father to a Salvadoran prison

This is the second time in a week that Trump officials have relented on one of the cases in which federal judges ordered the government to bring back a deportee removed from the country without due process. A gay Guatemalan asylum seeker known in court documents as O.C.G., who was wrongly deported to Mexico, was allowed to return and pursue his protection claim on Wednesday. The Trump administration remains defiant elsewhere, however, holding a group of men from Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and other nations in a shipping container on a U.S. military base in Djibouti while it attempts to deport them to South Sudan.

Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, an attorney for Abrego Garcia, told me the administration’s decision to bring his client back is a sign that “they were playing games with the court all along.”

Standard legal procedure would entail filing criminal charges against an alleged perpetrator and convicting them prior to a deportation—not the other way around, as the Trump administration is now attempting, Sandoval-Moshenberg said. “Due process means the chance to defend yourself before you’re punished, not after,” he said. “This is an abuse of power, not justice. The government should put him on trial, yes—but in front of the same immigration judge who heard his case in 2019, which is the ordinary manner of doing things.”

After Abrego Garcia’s return, government attorneys told U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis that they intend to file a motion to dismiss the case challenging his unlawful deportation.

Abrego Garcia was stopped for speeding by Tennessee state troopers in December 2022 while driving a Chevy Suburban with nine male passengers, none of whom carried identification, according to the indictment. Abrego Garcia was cited for an expired license, but he was not arrested or charged with a crime, even though troopers flagged the incident as a potential trafficking case.

Abrego Garcia told officers that he’d been sent by his employer to pick up the men for a construction job, and his family has said that he would sometimes drive workers between job sites. They have denied the government’s claims that Abrego Garcia was an MS-13 member.

Driving passengers for money wouldn’t be a crime unless the government can prove that Abrego Garcia knew he was transporting passengers who were unlawfully present, Andrew Rankin, an immigration attorney in Memphis, told me. Participating in a criminal conspiracy to bring them across the U.S.-Mexico border, as the government alleges, would bring severer penalties.

“What did he know? Did he have actual knowledge? What was the discussion between each person and Abrego?” Rankin said. “And if these people were in violation of the law, the government could offer immunity to testify against him.”

The indictment identifies six unnamed co-conspirators and says that Abrego Garcia transported MS-13 gang members on the trips. One of the co-conspirators told investigators that Abrego Garcia “abused some of the female undocumented aliens” and was ordered to stop because it was “bad for business.”

Rankin said it was highly unusual for the government to deport someone and then begin building a criminal indictment.

“Now that the government has had to essentially bend the knee to bring Mr. Abrego back, the government is upset, and they can’t just let him go,” Rankin told me. “They can’t just let him out and just let him walk around like he did before.”