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A federal judge this week canceled the trial of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man who was mistakenly deported, and scheduled a hearing on whether the prosecution is being vindictive in pursuing a human smuggling case against him.
Abrego Garcia has become a centerpiece of the debate over immigration after the Trump administration deported him in March to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Facing mounting public pressure and a court order, the Trump administration brought him back to the U.S. in June, but only after issuing an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee.
Abrego Garcia has denied the allegations, and argued that prosecutors are vindictively and selectively targeting him. Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw, Jr. wrote in Tuesday’s order that Abrego Garcia had enough evidence to hold a hearing on the topic, which Crenshaw scheduled for Jan. 28.
At that hearing, prosecutors will have to explain their reasoning for charging Abrego Garcia, Crenshaw wrote, and if they fail in that, the charges could be dismissed.
When Abrego Garcia was pulled over in 2022, there were nine passengers in the car, and the officers discussed among themselves their suspicions of smuggling. However, Abrego Garcia was eventually allowed to continue driving with only a warning.
A Department of Homeland Security agent previously testified that he did not begin investigating the traffic stop until after the U.S. Supreme Court said in April that the Trump administration had to work to bring Abrego Garcia from El Salvador, where he was deported.
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Years earlier, Abrego Garcia had been granted protection from deportation to his home country after a judge found he faced danger there from a gang that targeted his family. That order allowed Abrego Garcia, who has an American wife and child, to live and work in the U.S. under Immigration and Customs Enforcement supervision.
Members of President Donald Trump’s administration have accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of the MS-13 gang, but he has vehemently denied the accusations and has no criminal record.
Abrego Garcia’s defense attorney and the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
TheBlueBlaze on December 27th, 2025 at 16:03 UTC »
Back in April, the official White House Twitter account edited a New York Times headline to mock both the writer and Garcia himself, to call Garcia an "MS-13 illegal alien who's never coming back".
With that, they proudly admitted how symbolic his case had become: Garcia was nowhere near the "worst of the worst" the Trump administration had said was "invading" the country, but they had to keep pretending that he was in order to perpetuate the balancing act of presenting their mass deportation as somehow both massive in scope and precise in who it targeted.
The fact that now they want to deport him to Africa, not even on the same hemisphere he's from, is just proof of both the cruelty and desperation to "win" on open display. Sadly that cruelty appeals to people, because they are desperate to believe that society's problems are as simple as being caused by "bad people" merely existing in their country, and that punishing or expelling them automatically fixes the problems.
At the end of the day, the people most in support of all of these deportations care about validating their existing biases and making the world feel as simple as possible. And nothing does both quite as efficiently as blaming foreigners for everything they don't like about their country, their standing in life, and their own insecurities.
Gunslingerofthewildw on December 27th, 2025 at 14:55 UTC »
I'll tell you that right now.
Yes, he is.
Vanilla_Either on December 27th, 2025 at 14:54 UTC »
.... I mean, obviously lol