Abrego Garcia’s Lawyers Accuse Trump Administration of Vindictive Prosecution

Lawyers for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant at the center of a legal maelstrom after he was wrongfully expelled to El Salvador in March, accused the Justice Department on Tuesday of vindictively bringing a criminal case against him in retaliation for trying to hold the Trump administration accountable for his mistaken deportation.

The accusations, made in a 35-page filing in Federal District Court in Nashville, amounted to an effort by Mr. Abrego Garcia to call out the behavior of the administration, which has been going after him in one form or another for nearly five months.

In a reminder of the government’s many missteps in the case, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers pointed out that Trump officials first removed him from the United States in violation of a court order. They added that instead of taking the traditional path and quickly returning him, the White House “began a public campaign to punish Mr. Abrego for daring to fight back, culminating in the criminal investigation” that led to his indictment.

“Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been singled out by the United States government,” the lawyers wrote. “It is obvious why. And it is not because of the seriousness of his alleged conduct. Nor is it because he poses some unique threat to this country. Instead, Mr. Abrego was charged because he refused to acquiesce in the government’s violation of his due process rights.”

The sharp-edged filing was the second time that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have sought to hold the Trump administration’s feet to the fire for how it has handled his expulsion to El Salvador and its aftermath. In mid-June, the lawyers asked Judge Paula Xinis, who is overseeing a civil case in Maryland arising from his deportation, to sanction the administration for its “sustained and flagrant” violations of her orders.

The filing in Tennessee came as Mr. Abrego Garcia’s intertwined civil and criminal cases neared a significant inflection point. He is likely to be freed from criminal custody on Friday after a federal judge in Nashville put his original release order on hold for a month. And that will force the government to decide whether it intends to push forward with his prosecution or turn him over to immigration officials to begin the process of deporting him again.

In a separate filing on Tuesday, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers asked the court in Tennessee to allow him to return to Maryland as a free man on Friday as the administration decides what to do next. He is already protected against immediate re-expulsion under a ruling issued last month by Judge Xinis, who ordered the administration to provide him with a warning of at least three business days if officials planned to seek his removal to a country other than El Salvador.

Motions for selective and vindictive prosecution are notoriously hard to win because they require proving that the government singled out a defendant for charges in comparison with similarly situated cases and used the charges to punish them merely for trying to vindicate their rights. While Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers acknowledged as much in their own motion, they also noted, “If there has ever been a case for dismissal on those grounds, this is that case.”

They alleged that “a wide-ranging and unprecedented retribution campaign” against their client began almost from the moment that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s family sued the Trump administration, seeking his return from El Salvador. Even after the White House realized that he had been mistakenly deported to a notorious terrorism prison in that country, officials “quickly latched onto unsubstantiated claims” that he was a member of the street gang MS-13 “to justify its mistake,” the lawyers wrote.

Those claims were subsequently echoed by top Trump officials, including Vice President JD Vance, who falsely declared in early April that Mr. Abrego Garcia “was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here.” Other aides to Mr. Trump soon joined in what the lawyers described as an “effort to discredit Mr. Abrego,” claiming publicly that he was “violent, a gang member and a terrorist.”

Presiding over the civil case, Judge Xinis ultimately ordered the White House to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release from El Salvador in a ruling that was later upheld by both a federal appeals court and the Supreme Court.

But even afterward, Trump officials kept up their drumbeat of attacks against Mr. Abrego Garcia, his lawyers said, calling him “gangbanger,” “monster,” “illegal predator,” “illegal alien terrorist,” “wife beater” and “human trafficker.”

While the government waged this public smear campaign, the lawyers said, it also used its prosecutorial powers “to support its arguments against him in the court of public opinion.” In June, prosecutors in Tennessee unsealed an indictment charging Mr. Abrego Garcia with having taken part in a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle undocumented immigrants across the United States.

At the heart of the case was a 2022 traffic stop during which Mr. Abrego Garcia was pulled over and discovered to be driving several Hispanic men, some of whom were in the country illegally. Even though the F.B.I. learned about the stop at the time, it decided not to do anything about it and Mr. Abrego Garcia was released without charges.

His lawyers now contend that the federal authorities re-examined that stop and further investigated it only because Mr. Abrego Garcia embarrassed the administration by suing about his wrongful deportation.

“The facts about Mr. Abrego’s alleged criminal conduct did not change in the intervening three years,” the lawyers wrote. “What did change was that the government unlawfully renditioned Mr. Abrego to El Salvador, and he challenged that illegal conduct.”

The lawyers also pointed to several extraordinary statements made by Mr. Trump and his top aides after the charges were announced.

On the day the indictment was unsealed, they wrote, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche went on television and asserted that the government had begun to investigate Mr. Abrego Garcia only after Judge Xinis had questioned the administration’s decision to deport him and accused officials of “doing something wrong.”

Soon after, Mr. Trump himself lauded the Justice Department for having charged Mr. Abrego Garcia, saying he could see the decision as a way to “show everybody how horrible this guy is.”

“The unprecedented public pronouncements attacking Mr. Abrego for his successful exercise of constitutional rights by senior cabinet members, leaders of the D.O.J. and even the president of the United States,” the lawyers wrote, “make this the rare case where actual vindictiveness is clear from the record.”