WASHINGTON — “I am grateful that today, justice has taken a step forward,” Kilmar Ábrego García said after U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw Jr. dismissed criminal charges pressed by the U.S. Justice Department against him in Nashville, Tennessee, May 22. He thanked CASA, the immigrant rights group that defends him, and all of his supporters.
The International Association of Sheetmetal, Air, Rail and Transportation, the union Ábrego García belongs to, has stood with him all along.
Without these supporters, this latest win would not have happened. At a May 1 rally in Washington, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Ábrego García’s wife, proudly said, “I stand here able to say that he is finally home, because the movement we are building has shown up time after time.”
The Nashville judge threw out the government’s “human smuggling” charges against Ábrego García, claiming he was conspiring to traffic immigrants between 2016 and 2025. They said that was what he was doing when he drove a carload of construction workers in Nashville Nov. 30, 2022, and was stopped by the police for a traffic violation. But the cops who stopped him let him go without even a ticket.
Crenshaw ruled that the charges were vindictive retaliation against Ábrego García for his successful fight against his deportation. “The Court does not reach its conclusion lightly,” Crenshaw wrote in a 32-page decision. “The objective evidence here shows that, absent Ábrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution.”
Top Department of Justice officials, including Todd Blanche, now the acting U.S. attorney general, made the key decisions in the case, not prosecutors in Tennessee.
Ábrego García, a 30-year-old union apprentice, had been taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in Beltsville, Maryland, while driving in his car with his son on March 12, 2025. Despite an explicit court order telling the government not to send him back to El Salvador, where he and his family had been threatened by gang members, ICE flew him there. He was caged in the notorious CECOT maximum security prison, beaten and tortured.
Vasquez Sura recognized him from a newspaper photo and a video posted of him being frog-walked by CECOT guards. She filed an appeal of his deportation on his behalf.
In Crenshaw’s decision, he documents how the government’s frame-up unfolded. On April 4, 2025, after U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland ordered the government to “facilitate” Ábrego García’s return from El Salvador, which was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court after the government appealed, the Justice Department stalled for weeks.
Instead, the Department of Homeland Security launched an “investigation” April 17 into the 2022 traffic stop and had him indicted on May 21. Then Ábrego García was returned to the U.S. to face charges June 6.
“We have said from day one that this case was nothing more than a political vendetta,” Ama Frimpong, Chief of Services at CASA, told the press after the ruling. The federal administration’s brazen effort “to manipulate the legal system has been exposed and it has collapsed.”
Supporters of Ábrego García remain vigilant. He is still battling government efforts to deport him to Liberia — a country he has no connection to and where he would have no protection against being sent back to El Salvador. The Department of Justice had earlier attempted to deport him to Uganda, Eswatini and Ghana.
Ábrego García has said he is willing to be sent to Costa Rica, and the government there has agreed to receive him. But the DOJ has refused to do so, another vindictive act.
This May 12 at a hearing in Maryland, Judge Xinis again upheld orders that protect Ábrego García from deportation for now. The Justice Department filed another appeal even before the judge issued her ruling! And they say they’ll appeal the dismissal of the criminal case.
Ábrego García’s courage, and the support he has won, sets an example for others across the country.