Those were whether Abrego Garcia had received due process when he was plucked off the streets without a warrant and expelled days later to a prison in El Salvador, in what even President Donald Trump’s officials have repeatedly admitted was an error.
And, whether Trump Administration officials should be held in contempt for repeatedly stonewalling a judge’s effort to get to the bottom of their actions.
Well before Abrego Garcia’s family filed a lawsuit seeking to force the White House to release him from El Salvador, Administration officials had tried all means at their disposal to keep him overseas as they figured out a solution to the problem they had created, the New York Times found in a recent investigation.
In the days before the Administration’s error was made public, officials at the Department of Homeland Security discussed portraying Abrego Garcia as a “leader” of MS-13, even though they could find no evidence to support the claim.
They considered ways to nullify the original order that had barred his deportation to El Salvador.
And they sought to downplay the danger he might face in one of that country’s most notorious prisons.
To Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, it was no surprise that the same officials who had fought so hard against securing his return, suddenly agreed to bring him back after they had obtained an indictment that bolstered the story they had been telling from the start.
“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, one of the lawyers.
“It’s now up to our judicial system to see that Abrego Garcia receives the due process that the Constitution guarantees.”
Questions have already been raised about the criminal case, filed in the US District Court in Nashville, Tennessee.
There was concern and disagreement in recent weeks among prosecutors about how to proceed with the charges, two people familiar with the matter said, leading to the resignation of a supervisor in the federal prosecutor’s office handling the case.
Regardless of how the case turns out, the return of Abrego Garcia suggests that the Administration was, at least in some ways, feeling the heat of the three court orders that it was facing to facilitate his freedom.
The decision could be read, in fact, as the Justice Department simultaneously caving to the orders while also flexing its muscles.
By indicting Abrego Garcia, the department, after all, gave itself the perfect excuse to bring him back to the US – one that served to avoid a potentially painful confrontation with the Supreme Court and to burnish the Administration’s law-and-order image.
And as Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney-General, pointed out on Saturday NZT, the charges could render moot the lawsuit filed by Abrego Garcia’s family.
If that happens, it might get the White House off the hook entirely for the way in which it skirted due process in deporting Abrego Garcia.
Last month, the Justice Department took a somewhat similar approach in the case of Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist employed by Harvard University.
Petrova was detained three months ago after failing to declare scientific samples she was carrying in her luggage.
When it appeared as if Petrova might walk free in her immigration case, prosecutors filed a criminal charge against her for behaviour that would ordinarily be treated as a minor infraction, punishable with a fine.
Petrova’s lawyer, Gregory Romanovsky, said at the time that the criminal charge, “filed three months after the alleged customs violation, is clearly intended to make Kseniia look like a criminal to justify their efforts to deport her”.
The Trump Administration is facing several other court orders to “facilitate” the return of immigrants who were recently expelled under wrongful or questionable circumstances.
Last Thursday, in a rare example of compliance with a court order, the White House brought back to the US a Guatemalan man who was deported to Mexico this year in violation of an order forbidding immigrants from being sent to countries not their own, without first being given a “meaningful opportunity” to challenge their removal.
It remains unclear what effect the return of Abrego Garcia will have on a different group of immigrants: the nearly 140 Venezuelan men who were sent to El Salvador on the same set of flights that he was on – albeit under the powers of a different legal tool, a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.
Just a few days ago, a federal judge in Washington, James Boasberg, ordered the Administration to take steps towards giving the Venezuelan men the due process that they had been denied.
But even though they were being held in El Salvador under similar terms as Abrego Garcia, there was no guarantee that Trump officials would bring them back, said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who has been representing them.
“Clearly, the Administration has the technical ability to return people from El Salvador,” Gelernt said, pointing to the example of Abrego Garcia.
“At a minimum, that reinforces what we have always believed – that the Government can bring back anyone it wants, if it actually wants to.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alan Feuer
Photographs by: Allison Bailey
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
