‘It’s A Top Priority’: Unsealed Order Suggests DOJ Retaliated Against Abrego Garcia for Court Victory

Kilmar Abrego Garcia with Jennifer Vasquez Sura, his wife, a federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Dec. 22. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

A new court filing suggests the Department of Justice (DOJ) may have pressed criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a Maryland man who was illegally sent to a notorious Salvadoran megaprison as part of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown — in retaliation for a court victory that ultimately brought him back to the United States.

In June, after Abrego Garcia successfully challenged his removal to El Salvador in a federal court in Maryland, the DOJ returned him to the United States and charged him with immigrant smuggling in Nashville, Tennessee.

Now, a newly unsealed order from U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw indicates that top DOJ officials only began to discuss pressing charges against Abrego Garcia after the Maryland ruling.

And, in one instance, a key aide to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told federal prosecutors in Tennessee that bringing a smuggling case against Abrego Garcia over a traffic stop in 2022 was “a top priority” of the department.

The order sheds new light on the thinking and potential motives behind the DOJ’s decision to press charges against Abrego Garcia, whose case became a national flashpoint in Trump’s push for “mass deportations.” 

At the time of his removal to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a previous order by an immigration judge prevented the U.S. from deporting Abrego Garcia to El Salvador because he would likely face persecution and torture by criminal gangs there.

Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty to the immigrant smuggling charges and also asked Crenshaw to dismiss the case. He alleged that the DOJ only sought the charges to punish him for asserting his rights in court — and winning.

In October, Judge Crenshaw determined that preliminary evidence and extrajudicial statements from Blanche, Attorney General Pam Bondi and other Trump officials raised a “realistic likelihood” that the department sought the charges for vindictive reasons.

In particular, Crenshaw highlighted Blanche’s comments during a Fox News interview in June, during which the deputy attorney general said the government only started investigating Abrego Garcia after a judge ruled that the Trump administration did not have the authority to remove him from the U.S.

Crenshaw also concluded that Abrego Garcia was entitled to discovery against the Trump administration and a hearing in which he could present evidence on why his case should be dismissed due to vindictive and selective prosecution.

However, since that ruling, the DOJ has largely stonewalled Abrego Garcia’s requests for documents that could reveal how the department decided to prosecute him over a three-year-old traffic stop. The DOJ repeatedly claimed the materials were protected in part by attorney-client privilege.  

On Dec. 3, Crenshaw filed an order under seal requiring the department to turn over many of the documents Abrego Garcia requested. That order was unsealed Tuesday. 

In it, Crenshaw said that an in-court review of over 3,000 documents provided by the government indicated that the decision to charge Abrego Garcia “may have been a joint decision” between federal prosecutors in Tennessee and “others who may or may not have acted with an improper motivation.”

The judge added that the documents tied back to Blanche because Aakash Singh, an associate deputy attorney general and one of Blanche’s key aides, was directly involved in charging deliberations.

In an April 30 email to Robert McGuire — the acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, who made the final decision to seek the indictment — Singh said charging Abrego Garcia was of prime importance to the department.

“It’s a top priority,” he wrote.

Singh sent McGuire the email over two weeks after the Supreme Court upheld a district court ruling ordering the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador.

In response to Singh’s email, McGuire said that he wanted “the high command looped in” before making a final decision. 

In a separate email about a possible indictment against Abrego Garcia, McGuire wrote: “Ultimately, I would hope to have [the Office of the Deputy Attorney General] (ODAG) eyes on it as we move towards a decision about whether this matter is going to ultimately be charged.”

McGuire added that while he hadn’t received a specific direction from Blanche’s office, he heard “anecdotally” that the deputy attorney general “would like Garcia charged sooner rather than later.”

In response to Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss, the DOJ claimed that McGuire acted alone in bringing the charges. Crenshaw, however, said the DOJ’s own documents indicated otherwise.

“Specifically, the government’s documents may contradict its prior representations that the decision to prosecute was made locally and that there were no outside influences,” the judge wrote. 

Crenshaw added that while he recognized the DOJ’s assertion of privileges to shield the documents from discovery, they were ultimately outweighed by Abrego Garcia’s due process right to a non-vindictive prosecution.

“If the work product, attorney-client, and deliberative process privileges asserted by the government precluded all discovery in the context of a vindictiveness motion, defendants would never be able to answer the question ‘what motivated the government’s prosecution?’” Crenshaw wrote.

In early December, a separate federal judge ordered the Trump administration to release Abrego Garcia from immigration detention after finding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been unlawfully holding him in custody for months. 

Soon thereafter, the same judge blocked the government from re-arresting Abrego Garcia after a top immigration judge attempted to surreptitiously rewrite a 2019 immigration ruling to allow his deportation.