The Other Vindictive Part of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's Case

A judge last week threw out a criminal indictment against him on the grounds that it was tainted by vindictiveness. But that same spirit infects another part of his story that few people have discussed.

The criminal prosecution against Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the Salvadoran national whose story became a flashpoint last year in the immigration debate—must be dismissed, a federal judge ruled last week, finding it had been tainted unconstitutionally by vindictiveness. The Justice Department, vowing to appeal, said in a statement that "another activist judge has placed politics above public safety."

It is an ironic accusation. Abrego Garcia may be guilty of smuggling people across the border. But the indictment against him, in connection with a 2022 traffic stop and ensuing investigation that had been closed without charges, was always about politics above public safety. It is not a mystery. The confirmation came from the Trump administration itself, in ways that extend beyond the scope of the ruling. Most revealing is that Abrego Garcia could likely have been deported long ago.

He emerged as a symbol of illegal migration, and the federal government's approach to combating it, in March 2025 after the administration sent him to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador. It had done so as the result of an "administrative error," said the government, which was forced to concede that Abrego Garcia had a withholding of removal to the very country it had deported him to. The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland ultimately ruled that the executive branch was obligated to "facilitate" his return, which the Supreme Court unanimously confirmed.

The news cycle set off a political battle that was, in many ways, much bigger than one person. Government leaders denounced Abrego Garcia or made entreaties on his behalf; that included Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D–Md.), who went to El Salvador and met with him in person.

Abrego Garcia returned to the United States in June. It was not the ideal outcome for the Trump administration, which had claimed it had no power to bring him back. This time, however, Abrego Garcia was under criminal indictment. "We got him out of here," Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general, told Fox News' Laura Ingraham that month. (Blanche has since been promoted to the top job.) "And a judge in Maryland and many members of Congress…questioned that decision" to deport him. So the government "started…investigating him."

That admission would prove fatal in court. "Blanche's words directly confirm that the Executive Branch reopened the criminal investigation because the Judicial Branch required the Executive Branch to facilitate Abrego's return from El Salvador," writes Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. "The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego's successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution. The Executive Branch closed its investigation on the November 2022 traffic stop. Only after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his rights did the Executive Branch reopen that investigation."

But while the ruling does not touch on it, a vindictive spirit infects another part of Abrego Garcia's story—one few people have discussed—which complicates the claim that this is about "public safety" rather than "politics."

Lost on many is that the Costa Rican government agreed to accept Abrego Garcia in August. The country has a standing agreement with the U.S. to take deportees who cannot be deported to their home countries. The federal government was, originally, fine with this plan—it was the one that raised it as an offer. But it came as a condition of a plea deal with the (now-dismissed) criminal indictment. When Abrego Garcia declined to plead guilty, the Trump administration moved to exact punishment another way: by instead deporting him to Uganda.

The problem: Uganda did not agree to take him. So the federal government pivoted to Eswatini. That country had "not received any communication regarding this person," Eswatini's spokesperson, Thabile Mdluli, said in a statement after news broke. No such agreement would come to fruition. The Trump administration then did another about-face, this time to Ghana.

"Ghana is not accepting Abrego Garcia," Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, its minister for foreign affairs, said in October. "He cannot be deported to Ghana."

At a court hearing shortly thereafter, the government announced it would seek to send Abrego Garcia to Liberia, which agreed on a "temporary" basis. Costa Rica was not an option anymore, the Trump administration told the court, because it no longer "wish[ed] to receive him."

That was news to Costa Rica. "That position that we have expressed in the past," Mario Zamora Cordero—Costa Rica's minister of public security—said in November, "remains valid and unchanged to this day."

Yet the Trump administration has instead opted to spend taxpayer dollars prolonging this—not because there is no viable deportation plan, but because officials want to wait for one that will inflict maximum suffering. In his ruling, Crenshaw wrote that the government did not explain its "change in position to remove Abrego and not prosecute him to then prosecute and not remove him." The question unfortunately answers itself.