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The dueling moves reflected how federal law enforcement officers have at times been put in the position of pursuing the Trump administration’s shifting political agenda.
June 30, 2025, 1:57 p.m. ET
For nearly six years, Task Force Vulcan, a federal law enforcement team set up by President Trump during his first term in the White House, was enormously successful in pursuing its central mission: taking down the leadership of the violent transnational street gang MS-13.
But by this spring, the group was redirected into carrying out what appeared to be contradictory goals.
The unit’s agents and prosecutors were asked to unwind some of the charges they had brought against MS-13’s highest-ranking leaders even as they diverted resources into prosecuting a defendant whose ties to the gang were far more tenuous but whose case had become a political liability for the Trump administration.
In late April, Vulcan prosecutors were engaged in a pitched legal battle to dismiss the criminal case against an MS-13 leader named Vladimir Arévalo Chávez who was accused of serious crimes, including multiple murders. The goal was to release Mr. Arévalo from U.S. custody and send him back to his homeland in El Salvador.
At the same time, the Vulcan team was assembling a criminal case against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man accused of belonging to the gang who had been wrongly deported to El Salvador. Prosecutors were seeking to free Mr. Abrego Garcia from Salvadoran custody and bring him back to the United States to face indictment on charges of smuggling undocumented immigrants.
By any measure, the task force’s split-screen mission was unusual as Vulcan team members unraveled indictments against some of the most senior members of MS-13 even as they began to build one against Mr. Abrego Garcia — a man who, according to the charges that were ultimately filed, appeared to be a midlevel functionary in the gang.
