A man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration has been returned to the US to face criminal charges.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was charged in an indictment filed in federal court in Tennessee with conspiring to transport illegal immigrants into the US, Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday.
Court records have shown the indictment was filed on 21 May, more than two months after he was deported from the US under a controversial 18th-century wartime law.
In a statement, Abrego Garcia’s lawyer Andrew Rossman said it would now be up to the US 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,” he said.
Abrego Garcia was deported from Maryland despite an immigration judge’s 2019 order granting him protection after finding he was likely to be persecuted by gangs if he was returned there.
The indictment alleges that Mr Garcia worked with at least five co-conspirators to bring immigrants to the US illegally and transport them from the border to other destinations in the country.
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On Friday, Ms Bondi outlined the charges at a news conference: “The grand jury found that over the past nine years, Abrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring.
“He made over 100 trips the grand jury found – smuggling people throughout our country… MS-13 [international criminal gang] members, violent gang terrorist organisation members… throughout our country.
“He will be prosecuted in our country, sentenced in our country if convicted and then returned after completion of his sentence.”
Ms Bondi said Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele agreed to return Mr Garcia to the US after American officials presented his government with an arrest warrant.
Democrat senator Chris Van Hollen travelled to El Salvador in April to meet Mr Garcia, arguing his constitutional rights to due process were being ignored.
Critics of Donald Trump have pointed to the deportation of Mr Garcia as an example of the excesses of the Republican president’s aggressive immigration policies.
US District Judge Paula Xinis has opened a probe into what, if anything, Mr Trump’s administration has done to secure his return, after his lawyers accused officials of stonewalling their requests for information.
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Officials responded by alleging that Mr Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang – something his lawyers have strongly denied.
In a separate statement, Pam Bondi also attacked what she called the “Fake News Media” and repeated the – yet unproven – allegations against Mr Garcia.
“The Justice Department’s Grand Jury Indictment against Abrego Garcia proves the unhinged Democrat Party was wrong, and their stenographers in the Fake News Media were once again played like fools.
“Abrego Garcia was never an innocent ‘Maryland Man’- Abrego Garcia is an illegal alien terrorist, gang member, and human trafficker who has spent his entire life abusing innocent people, especially women and the most vulnerable.”
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