WASHINGTON — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man at the center of a political and legal maelstrom after he was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, has been returned to the United States to face charges related to transporting migrants living in the country illegally, according to an indictment unsealed Friday.

The stunning move, which had been quietly planned for several weeks, could provide a much-needed off-ramp for the Trump administration, which has bitterly opposed a series of court orders to take steps to release him after his wrongful removal March 15.

The 10-page indictment, filed in the Middle District of Tennessee, also represents a potential effort to save face: Bringing Abrego Garcia back to face criminal charges — rather than complying with the dictates of three federal courts, including the Supreme Court — allows the White House to avoid an increasingly difficult legal confrontation, while enabling the administration to press its claim that he is a dangerous criminal who was worthy of removal in the first place.

Attorney General Announces Return

“Abrego Garcia has landed in the United States to face justice,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said at a news conference in Washington. “He was a smuggler of humans, and women and children.”

Since the start of the case, administration officials have sought to depict Abrego Garcia, a metal worker who has lived illegally in the United States without incident for years, as a member of the violent street gang MS-13. The charges filed against him in U.S. District Court in Nashville accused him of belonging to the gang and taking part in a conspiracy to “transport thousands of undocumented aliens” across the United States.

Legal Team Welcomes Court Challenge

His lawyers said they welcomed their day in court and pointed out that the government’s decision to return him to the United States undercut its long-standing efforts to keep him in El Salvador.

“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,” said Andrew Rossman, a lawyer for Abrego Garcia. “It’s now up to our judicial system to see that Mr. Abrego Garcia receives the due process that the constitution guarantees to all persons.”

Months of Legal Battles

Abrego Garcia has been in Salvadoran custody since March 15 when he was flown, along with scores of other migrants, into the hands of jailers at the so-called Terrorism Confinement Center, a notorious prison known as CECOT. He was later moved to another facility in El Salvador.

For nearly three months, his lawyers have been trying every trick in their legal playbook to enforce court orders demanding that the Trump administration “facilitate” his release from El Salvador.

From the beginning of the case, officials have acknowledged that Abrego Garcia was wrongfully expelled to El Salvador in violation of a previous court order that expressly barred him being sent to the country. But the Justice Department, acting on behalf of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, has not given an inch beyond that admission, saying only that if Abrego Garcia presented himself at the U.S. border, officials would “facilitate” his reentry to the country.

Justice Department lawyers have also spent weeks stonewalling an effort by Judge Paula Xinis, who is overseeing the case, to get answers to the question of what the White House has done, and planned to do, to seek Abrego Garcia’s freedom. The administration’s serial refusals to respond to inquiries about its own behavior in the case has so annoyed Xinis that this week she allowed Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to seek sanctions against the government.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Devlin Barrett, Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush/Haiyun Jiang
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