DOJ Official Resigns After Administration Charges Abrego Garcia

[struggle4progress]

Critics say the administration’s human trafficking charges against Abrego Garcia should be viewed with skepticism.

By Chris Walker , Truthout
PublishedJune 9, 2025

A top official within the Nashville, Tennessee, area’s Department of Justice (DOJ) offices has resigned after the Trump administration charged Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man mistakenly deported from the U.S. earlier this year, with human trafficking ...

After months of claiming they weren’t able to return Abrego Garcia to his family in the U.S. and dubiously alleging that he was a gang member to justify his deportation, the administration finally brought him back to the U.S. over the past weekend. In doing so, however, they also filed federal human trafficking charges against him, which some critics have alleged are based on dubious and circumstantial evidence.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers noted how easy it was for the administration to get their client back to the U.S. after previously claiming they were unable to do so.

“Today’s action proves what we’ve known all along — that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so,” said Andrew Rossman, one of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers ...

https://truthout.org/articles/doj-official-resigns-after-trump-administration-charges-abrego-garcia/

[struggle4progress]

1. Indictment Raises More Questions Than It Answers

By Andrew C. McCarthy
June 10, 2025 12:30 PM

... For weeks, in its newfangled role as annex to the White House Press Office, the Trump DOJ had peddled uncharged evidence of the illegal alien’s criminal activities, domestic abuse, and membership in Mara Salvatrucha — i.e., MS-13, the violent international gang that the Trump administration has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The most notable information was that, in 2022, Abrego Garcia had been detained by Tennessee state troopers in what appeared to be a human-smuggling operation — although he had not been placed under arrest, much less charged with a crime.

... the indictment charges Abrego Garcia with two counts of harboring and transporting illegal aliens — the substantive offense of doing so, and the offense of conspiring to do so, both in violation of Section 1324 of the immigration laws. Each charge is punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment, and potentially no imprisonment (the two counts statutorily aggregate to zero to ten years’ imprisonment, but for sentencing guidelines purposes they’d likely be folded into one offense, punishable by zero to five years).

... Abrego Garcia is not charged with any other crimes. Why is that worth pointing out? Because the indictment strongly suggests that the government is poised to present information from accomplices (referred to as CC-1 through CC-6, with “CC” standing for “co-conspirator”) that Abrego Garcia was “a member and associate of” MS-13, which is “a criminal enterprise engaged in, among other activities, acts and threats involving murder, extortion, narcotics trafficking, firearms trafficking, alien smuggling, and money laundering.”

... The Trump DOJ is trying to brand him with these crimes without charging him with these crimes ...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/06/the-abrego-garcia-indictment-raises-more-questions-than-it-answers/

[struggle4progress]

2. rump says return of Abrego Garcia 'wasn't my decision'

Sudiksha Kochi
USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said in a new interview that he didn’t speak with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele about Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States to face human trafficking charges, saying the move wasn't his choice.

Trump told NBC News on June 7 it "wasn’t my decision" to bring Abrego Garcia back to the country. Instead, he told the outlet the U.S. Justice Department “decided to do it that way, and that’s fine” ...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/08/trump-salvadoran-president-abrego-garcia/84101545007/

I'm just the attention-grabbing inflatable gasbag

[spanone]

3. They'll get a few folks to lie about Garcia and they'll lock him up for life.

Bet that's the plan.

[flamingdem]

5. He drove some people somewhere

So it's life in prison for him...

[struggle4progress]

4. The Big Lies of rump tyranny

by Will Bunch | Columnist
Published June 10, 2025, 12:23 p.m. ET

... Xochitl ... was in the McDonald’s next to the busy Home Depot on Wilshire Boulevard near downtown Los Angeles last Friday when she saw the masked men burst from a van, as 100 or so mostly brown-skinned men and women ran frantically in every direction.

“They were just grabbing people,” Xochitl recounted two days later, after watching her neighbors getting handcuffed. “They don’t ask questions. They didn’t know if any of us were in any kind of immigration process” ...

In metro Los Angeles, the ICE raids continued into the weekend amid a backdrop of accelerating public unrest, as demonstrators confronted federal agents, blocked a major freeway and chanted obscenities against ICE and the Trump regime. A handful of self-driving Waymo cars were burned in the street, but the bulk of the violence — from tear gas assaults to brutal beatings captured on video — was committed by state security forces ...

The story of what’s really happening in Los Angeles is the story of Trump’s American authoritarianism: It starts with a Big Lie — the fallacy that mass deportation would only target murderers, rapists, and other hardened criminals — that hides the true purpose of bending some laws and totally ignoring others, for the sole purpose of amassing more power for the regime ...

https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/la-immigrants-protests-national-guard-marines-trump-20250610.html

[struggle4progress]

6. Abrego Garcia is back but contempt and sanctions still on the table

June 9, 2025, 11:50 AM EDT
By Jordan Rubin

With Kilmar Abrego Garcia back in the U.S. after his illegal removal to a notorious Salvadoran prison, followed by months of Trump administration delay and defiance, the administration wants to focus on the new criminal charges it had waiting for him upon his return. But understanding what brought us to this point is crucial not only for how to think about the criminal case, but also because his civil case against the government isn’t over just because he’s back.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers reminded us of that Sunday in their latest court filing to U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, the Maryland judge who ordered the government to facilitate his return back in April. The filing came in response to the Trump Justice Department’s request Friday to halt pending civil litigation over fact-finding into the government’s facilitation efforts, just after Xinis had approved Abrego Garcia’s lawyers’ bid to file a sanctions motion against the government, due Wednesday.

Responding to the claim that the civil case is now moot due to his return, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers reminded the Obama appointee that she “still retains jurisdiction to find contempt and impose sanctions” ...

Urging Xinis to keep the civil case alive, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said the government’s “wanton disregard for the judicial branch has left a stain on the Constitution” and that if there’s “any hope of removing that stain, it must start by shining a light on the improper actions of the Government in this tragic affair and imposing meaningful remedies” ...

https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/abrego-garcia-returned-contempt-sanctions-trump-admin-still-table-rcna211782