The Kilmar Abrego Garcia Case

March 15, 2025: Deported to El Salvador

He was put on a flight to El Salvador three days after his arrest, without seeing a judge. A 2019 immigration court order barred sending him there.

No GovBrief story ran on this date. Coverage starts April 1, 2025.

April 10, 2025: Supreme Court says the government must facilitate his return

The justices, with no noted dissent, left in place Judge Paula Xinis' order that the government facilitate his release from Salvadoran custody. The administration then told her in writing that it had no duty to bring him back.

April 17, 2025: Sen. Chris Van Hollen meets him in El Salvador

Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen flew to El Salvador, was turned away at first, and met Abrego Garcia at a San Salvador hotel the next day. Abrego Garcia told him he had had no contact with anyone outside prison since his removal. President Nayib Bukele posted photos claiming the two were "sipping margaritas." Van Hollen said officials set the glasses on the table during the meeting and neither man touched them. Trump called the senator a fool, and the White House posted that Abrego Garcia was "never coming back."

June 7, 2025

June 6, 2025: Returned to face a smuggling indictment

The administration flew him back to the United States eight weeks after the Supreme Court ruling and took him to Tennessee. He faced two charges: conspiring to transport people who were in the country illegally, and transporting them, for money. Prosecutors tied both to a November 2022 traffic stop in which a Tennessee trooper found nine passengers in the vehicle he was driving. He told the trooper they were construction workers, and he was let go without a citation. He pleaded not guilty on June 13.

August 22 to 25, 2025: Released, then detained by ICE

He left the Putnam County jail in Cookeville, Tennessee, on August 22 and saw his family for the first time in more than 160 days. The same day, DHS told him it intended to deport him to Uganda. When he reported to the ICE office in Baltimore on August 25, he was taken into custody.

December 11, 2025: Judge orders his release

Judge Xinis ordered ICE to release him immediately, and he left a Pennsylvania detention center that afternoon. The next day she issued a temporary order barring ICE from detaining him at his check-ins. He had been in immigration custody for more than three months.

February 17, 2026: Detention ruled unconstitutional

Xinis replaced her temporary December order with a preliminary injunction, a longer-lasting bar on ICE taking him back into custody. She found that the legal period for holding him had run out and that the government had no workable plan to deport him. She wrote that officials had ignored Costa Rica, the one country that had offered to take him and where he agreed to go. Further detention, she found, would violate due process.

May 22, 2026: Smuggling indictment dismissed

In Nashville, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw ruled on the smuggling charges the government had brought when it returned Abrego Garcia. He dismissed both, finding that the government had not rebutted a presumption that the prosecution was vindictive, meaning brought to punish him for challenging his deportation. The investigation of the 2022 traffic stop had been closed and was reopened after he won at the Supreme Court. The ruling did not decide whether the smuggling allegations were true.

August 18, 2026

August 17, 2026: Justice Department asks an appeals court to revive the charges

The department's opening brief to the Sixth Circuit says career prosecutors brought the case on the evidence and that the judge misapplied precedent. His lawyers call that position "flat wrong." The appeals court has not ruled.