A wrongly deported Salvadoran man sent back to the United States during a fierce row over President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies was released Friday from prison, where he had been detained on human smuggling charges.
The US Supreme Court had ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia after he was mistakenly sent to a notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador in March.
He was returned in June, and then promptly arrested and charged with trafficking undocumented migrants. On Friday, he was released from prison in Tennessee at the order of a US judge.
“Today, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is free,” his attorney Sean Hecker said in a statement to AFP.
The case has become emblematic of Trump’s crackdown on illegal migration.
Right-wing supporters praise the Republican president’s toughness, but legal scholars and human rights advocates have blasted what they say is a haphazard rush to deport people in violation of basic US laws.
Hecker said Abrego Garcia was now “en route to his family in Maryland after being unlawfully arrested and deported, and then imprisoned, all because of the government’s vindictive attack on a man who had the courage to fight back against the administration’s continuing assault on the rule of law.”
Abrego Garcia is “grateful that his access to American courts has provided meaningful due process,” Hecker added.
But the saga may not be over for the Salvadoran.
The Trump administration is not barred from initiating “lawful immigration proceedings upon Abrego Garcia’s return to Maryland” — provided it gives 72 hours’ notice before deporting him to a third country — under a July federal court ruling.
Multiple US media outlets reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had notified his legal team that he had been ordered to report to immigration officials in Baltimore on Monday, and may be sent to the East African nation of Uganda.
DHS did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the reports.
But the White House responded to his release with a statement describing him as a “criminal illegal alien, wife-beater” and member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 — insisting he would “face justice for his crimes.”
“It’s an insult to his victims that this left-wing magistrate intervened to put him back on the streets,” Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson posted on X.
“Garcia will be subject to ankle monitoring to ensure the safety of the American public until further action can be taken.”
The Salvadoran’s attorneys accused federal prosecutors of “vindictive and selective prosecution” in a motion seeking to dismiss charges they said had been brought “because he refused to acquiesce in the government’s violation of his due process rights.”
*
Email *
Website
