A judge previously found that the U.S. government prosecuted Abrego-Garcia in retaliation for an incident that embarrassed the country.
Published August 18, 2026
President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to reinstate criminal charges against Kilmer Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man whose wrongful deportation embarrassed U.S. immigration authorities.
Late Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice asked a federal appeals court to overturn an earlier ruling by a judge that condemned the administration’s prosecution of Abrego-Garcia as a form of political retaliation.
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In a May ruling, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw found that the government’s efforts to bring criminal charges against Abrego-Garcia amounted to an “abuse of prosecutorial power.”
Federal prosecutors argued in briefs filed with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals that Crenshaw’s sentence was flawed in a motion to reinstate criminal charges brought by the Trump administration after he was forced to return to the United States.
The Salvadoran national was brought back to the United States after the government admitted that it wrongly deported him to El Salvador, where he was held in a detention facility run by the Salvadoran government and notorious for abusive conditions and alleged torture.
The Trump administration initially resisted efforts to return Abrego-Garcia, 31, to the United States, even after acknowledging he was wrongfully deported despite an immigration judge’s order in 2019 that he had a “well-founded fear” that he would be targeted in El Salvador.
The administration then filed criminal charges against Abrego-Garcia on human trafficking charges upon his return to the United States.
Crenshaw determined that there was evidence of a “presumed vendetta” on the part of the U.S. government and that Abrego-Garcia’s case would not have been prosecuted had it not been a public setback for the government.
Abrego Garcia had previously indicated he would agree to deportation to Costa Rica. But the Trump administration instead fought to have him deported to the African country of Liberia. It’s a place with no connection to Liberia and far from friends and family.
