Justice Dept. Promised to Prosecute Abrego Garcia. Now It’s Not So Clear.

From the moment that the Trump administration brought Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia back from his wrongful deportation to El Salvador to face criminal charges, the Justice Department has insisted that the indictment filed against him was a necessary tool to seek accountability against someone who was supposedly a dangerous criminal.

The prosecutors who brought the case, in Federal District Court in Nashville, have repeatedly said they intend to move toward trial as soon as possible. In making those claims, they were echoing sentiments expressed by their boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who declared at a news conference last month, “Abrego Garcia has landed in the United States to face justice.”

But recent developments suggest that the department is not quite as committed to pursuing the prosecution as it initially seemed. Indeed, if Mr. Abrego Garcia was returned from El Salvador to confront “American justice,” as Ms. Bondi put it, he might not actually be in the country long enough to face it.

In a pair of court hearings this week, Justice Department lawyers said that they would press forward with the case, but only on one condition: that Mr. Abrego Garcia remained in custody while he awaited trial. If he were freed on bail, they said, they would scrap the idea of trying him altogether and turn him over to immigration officials for immediate deportation.

That plan of action revealed a lot about the Justice Department’s priorities.

Typically, prosecutors go through the trouble of convening grand juries and seeking indictments because they want to obtain guilty verdicts against defendants. But in Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case, the administration appears to be primarily concerned with ensuring — whether through the courts or through immigration proceedings — that a man it has described as a “dangerous illegal immigrant” never walks free on U.S. soil.

“If this case is as meritorious as the attorney general has said, then you would think they would want to see it through to trial and conviction so that they could hold him accountable for his crimes,” said Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Detroit who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. “The idea that they may seek to deport him if they don’t get their way at the detention stage is remarkable.”