DOJ appeals dismissal of smuggling charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, calling judge's ruling an error

The Justice Department is fighting to revive human smuggling charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia after a federal judge threw them out as an "abuse of prosecuting power", a ruling prosecutors now say was legally wrong.

Federal prosecutors filed a brief with the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals late Monday arguing that U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw made critical errors when he dismissed the case against the 31-year-old Salvadoran national in May. The New York Post reported that the DOJ's appeal centers on Crenshaw's finding that the prosecution was driven by political retaliation, a conclusion the government says rests on a misreading of the facts and the law.

Abrego Garcia's case has become one of the most contested legal fights in the country. He entered the United States illegally as a teenager, lived in Maryland for years with an American wife and child, and was allowed to stay under a 2019 immigration court order that barred his deportation to El Salvador. That order found he had a "well founded fear" of a gang that had targeted his family back home. He was not granted residency. He lived and worked under ICE supervision.

A 2022 traffic stop sat dormant for years, until Abrego Garcia won in court

The smuggling charges trace back to a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee. But the Department of Homeland Security was aware of that stop for more than two years before Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador in 2025. Only after he sued the government over that deportation, and a court ordered him returned to the United States, did DHS reopen the case and begin investigating in earnest.

That sequence is at the heart of the dispute.

Judge Crenshaw, in his May ruling, found that Abrego Garcia would never have faced criminal charges had he not sued the government. Crenshaw stopped short of finding "actual vindictiveness" but concluded the evidence showed enough "presumptive vindictiveness" to warrant tossing the indictment. He pointed to the timing of the charges, to statements made by Todd Blanche, now the U.S. Attorney General but a deputy at the time, and to what Crenshaw described as sustained oversight of the case by top DOJ officials.

Crenshaw noted regular communications between then-Acting U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee Rob McGuire and Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh. He also flagged that prosecutors never called as a witness the investigator who actually reopened the case, a gap the judge found telling.

The judge rejected the government's argument that only McGuire's motives mattered because McGuire was the one who formally brought charges. Crenshaw found that the broader pattern of DOJ involvement made that argument untenable.

Prosecutors say Blanche's statements showed "legitimate motive," not retaliation

The DOJ's appellate brief pushes back on every pillar of Crenshaw's ruling. Prosecutors argue that Blanche's statements, which the judge interpreted as evidence of political targeting, actually "explained that the government was seeking to protect the public and confirm its prior assertions about Abrego's criminal activity." The brief characterizes Blanche's rationale as a "normal assessment of the societal interest in punishment," not an "improper penalty."

Even if Blanche's statements did reflect animus, the government contends, they are irrelevant. The person who actually brought charges was McGuire, and McGuire's motives were the only ones that should have been examined. Crenshaw explicitly rejected that framing, but the DOJ is now asking the appeals court to overrule him on that point.

The case raises a question that extends well beyond Abrego Garcia: how much weight should a court give to public statements by senior officials when evaluating whether a prosecution was politically motivated? Judges across the federal system have grappled with similar questions in other cases involving the Trump administration, and appellate courts have not always agreed with district judges who ruled against the government.

Abrego Garcia faces deportation threats to four countries, but not the one he chose

While the criminal case winds through the appeals process, Abrego Garcia's immigration fight continues on a separate track. The Trump administration has vowed to deport him to a third country, cycling through a list of destinations that includes Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana, and most recently Liberia. He is fighting the Liberia threat in a separate federal court case in Maryland.

Abrego Garcia has said he would agree to be deported to Costa Rica, and Costa Rica has said it will accept him. The U.S. government has declined that option.

That refusal stands out. If the goal is removal from the country, a willing destination and a willing deportee would seem to resolve the matter. The administration's insistence on alternatives suggests the objective is something beyond simple enforcement, a point Abrego Garcia's defenders have made and the government has not directly addressed in the material available.

The broader context matters for conservative readers who care about the credibility of federal law enforcement. The Trump administration has used executive authority aggressively on immigration and criminal justice, pardoning Americans convicted under environmental statutes it deemed politically motivated, and winning landmark rulings affirming the president's power over the executive branch. Those victories carry weight precisely because they rest on legal arguments, not the appearance of score-settling.

A prosecution that needs to stand on its own merits

The DOJ's appeal will test whether the 6th Circuit agrees that Crenshaw overstepped. If prosecutors can show the smuggling charges arose from legitimate law enforcement, not from the fact that Abrego Garcia embarrassed the government by winning his deportation lawsuit, the case could be revived and proceed to trial.

But the timeline works against that argument. A traffic stop known to DHS for more than two years. No investigation until after a court ordered the government to bring Abrego Garcia back. An indictment secured only then, followed by public statements from senior DOJ officials that a federal judge found suggestive of retaliation. Prosecutors did not even put the investigator who reopened the case on the stand.

The government's brief asks the appeals court to look past all of that and focus narrowly on McGuire's decision to file charges. Whether the 6th Circuit will accept that narrow frame, or adopt Crenshaw's broader view of how the case came together, remains an open question. No hearing date has been set.

Federal prosecutors have every right to pursue legitimate criminal indictments wherever the evidence leads. But a prosecution that looks like payback for a lawsuit undermines the rule of law it claims to defend, and conservatives who value equal justice should want the DOJ to prove this case is the real thing, not a grudge match dressed up in legal paperwork.