Inset: Kilmar Abrego Garcia in an undated photo (CASA). Background: President Donald Trump speaks with reporters in the Oval Office at the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo/Alex Brandon).
Now that a crucial vindictive prosecution evidentiary hearing has finally been held, attorneys for Kilmar Abrego Garcia told a federal judge that the Trump administration's refusal to have top officials testify about the origins of the human smuggling prosecution should bring the case to an end.
In the fall, at a time when multiple high-profile defendants were raising claims that the DOJ was vindictively or selectively prosecuting President Donald Trump's perceived enemies, the wrongly deported Salvadoran man persuaded U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw to find that the "totality of events create[d] a sufficient evidentiary basis to conclude that there is a 'realistic likelihood of vindictiveness' that entitles Abrego to discovery and requires an evidentiary hearing before the Court decides his motion" to dismiss on that ground.
Abrego Garcia was deported in March 2025 from Maryland and imprisoned in El Salvador at the Terrorism Confinement Center following Trump's Alien Enemies Act proclamation and claims of gang membership among hundreds of detainees.
The Trump administration, eventually acknowledging Abrego Garcia's deportation was due to "administrative error" but firing the lawyer who made that admission, was ordered by the Supreme Court to "facilitate" his return — and it carried out that return in June 2025, weeks after securing a federal indictment in Tennessee on charges of human smuggling, stemming from a closed investigation into a 2022 traffic stop.
The judge agreed that then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president's former criminal defense lawyer and the current acting AG after Pam Bondi's firing, made remarks on Fox News that "could be direct evidence of vindictiveness" by suggesting Abrego Garcia was being punished for successfully embarrassing the government in his habeas corpus case.
"To remove any doubt, Deputy Attorney General Blanche said that the criminal case was brought to return Abrego to the United States, 'not [because of] a Judge,' but instead, because of 'an arrest warrant issued by a grand jury in the Middle District of Tennessee,'" said Crenshaw, a Barack Obama appointee.
Blanche's statements, the judge went on, "could directly establish that the motivations for Abrego's criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights to bring suit against the Executive Official Defendants, rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct."
But the Trump administration vehemently resisted having Blanche and other high-ranking officials testify about internal deliberations, and instead threatened to seek extraordinary appellate relief. As both sides wrestled over discovery and sanctions, the evidentiary hearing had to be pushed back multiple times.
Ultimately, the government put forth two witnesses on Feb. 26, former acting U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire and Nashville-based Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge Rana Saoud. To hear the Trump administration tell it, neither of them were aware of the 2022 traffic stop until reading a Tennessee Star report in April 2025, which Saoud saw and then told McGuire about.
"Obtaining new evidence is textbook grounds to rebut the presumption of vindictiveness," the DOJ said in its post-hearing filing. "That is precisely what happened here."
Unsurprisingly, Abrego Garcia's lawyers have now responded that we'll never know the truth because the people with that knowledge — Blanche or his Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh, who allegedly "handed Mr. McGuire the key cooperator and pressured him to charge quickly" — did not testify.
"Instead of calling the actual witnesses who could explain the decision to reinvestigate and charge Mr. Abrego, the government called Agent Saoud and Mr. McGuire. But their testimony is insufficient to meet the government's burden because it is both legally irrelevant and patently incredible. As he has throughout this case, Mr. McGuire attempted to present himself as an independent decisionmaker who could not be swayed by pressures from the 'high command' to indict Mr. Abrego for vindictive reasons," the filing said. "He insisted throughout his testimony that he was taking no direction from ODAG and was merely keeping Mr. Singh updated."
"Similarly implausible, Agent Saoud claimed to have decided on her own, based on a newspaper article (planted by DHS sources according to the article itself), to open a purportedly separate investigation into Mr. Abrego. These explanations for the decisions to reopen the investigation and ultimately charge Mr. Abrego fly in the face of the documentary record, strain common sense, and amount to nothing more than legally irrelevant assertions of subjective good faith," the defense went on.
As a case-in-point that "senior DOJ officials remain in charge of this prosecution," the defense noted that Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the DOJ's top lawyer on civil matters and a former Mar-a-Lago prosecution defense attorney, entered an appearance in the case as soon as it seemed discovery would move forward.
Reminding the judge earlier found the government's "unwillingness to provide discovery that answers" key questions "particularly puzzling," the defense insisted the DOJ solved the puzzle all on its own.
"The government has no non-vindictive, 'objective explanations' for the decision to charge Mr. Abrego," the filing concluded. "The testimony and limited discovery the government has produced supports no explanation for this case other than the one Mr. Blanche has publicly expressed: that Mr. Abrego was vindictively prosecuted because he successfully challenged his unlawful removal to El Salvador."
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