A federal judge has concluded that the Department of Justice’s prosecution of Kilmar Ábrego García on human-smuggling charges may be an illegal retaliation after he successfully sued the Trump administration over his deportation to El Salvador.
The case of Ábrego, a Salvadorian national who was a construction worker in Maryland, has become a proxy for the partisan struggle over Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration policy and mass deportation agenda.
US district court judge Waverly Crenshaw granted a request late on Friday by lawyers for Ábrego and ordered discovery and an evidentiary hearing in Ábrego’s effort to show that the federal human-smuggling case against him in Tennessee is illegally retaliatory.
Crenshaw said Ábrego had shown that there is “some evidence that the prosecution against him may be vindictive”. That evidence included statements by various Trump administration officials and the timeline of the charges being filed.