First you know this man was threatened all the way back to the US that his family would be rounded up and tortured if he told of what happened to him in that prison. I wonder if they had to wait until injuries healed before they could let the public see him? Ron says they maybe starved him and had to feed him again to build up his weight and looks. Poor man I hope he is able to safely get his story out. It is clear the charges against him are fraudulent and made up. Just like the government kept saying he was an MS 13 gang member which two courts found he was not. Also he was living in Maryland and his court case is being heard in DC so why is the Justice department trying his new charges in Tennessee? Why not add the charges to the case being heard now in DC. Clearly they hope to get a much more conservative and racist court there than they would in the northern states. I am surprised they did not charge him in Texas. Hugs.
Mistakenly deported Salvadoran native Kilmar Abrego Garcia appeared in a Tennessee courtroom Friday, hours after he was brought back to the United States to face criminal charges for allegedly transporting undocumented migrants within the U.S.
More than two months after the Trump administration admitted it mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia from Maryland to his native El Salvador, a two-count indictment unsealed Friday alleges that he participated in a years long conspiracy to haul undocumented migrants from Texas to the interior of the country.
The return of Abrego Garcia from his native El Salvador follows a series of court battles in which the Trump administration repeatedly said it was unable to bring him back, drawing the country toward the brink of a constitutional crisis when the administration failed to heed the Supreme Court’s order to facilitate his return.
MORE: Justice Department investigating 2022 Abrego Garcia traffic stop: Sources
He made his initial court appearance Friday evening in the Middle District of Tennessee, answering “Yes, I understand” in Spanish when U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes asked him if he understood the charges against him.
Judge Homes set a hearing for June 13, where Abrego Garcia will be arraigned on charges and the judge will take up the government’s motion to hold him in pre-trial detention on the grounds that he “poses a danger to the community and a serious risk of flight” He will remain in federal custody in Tennessee pending next week’s hearing.
“If convicted at trial, the defendant faces a maximum punishment of 10 years’ imprisonment for ‘each alien’ he transported,” said the government’s motion for detention, which also contained an allegation — not included in the indictment — that one of Abrego Garcia’s co-conspirators told authorities that Abrego Garcia participated in the murder of a rival gang member’s mother in El Salvador.
Abrego Garcia’s attorney, in an online press briefing, called the charges against his client “an abuse of power.”
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is placed in the back seat of a truck by ICE agents after arriving in Nashville, Tenn., June 6, 2025.
ABC News
“They’ll stop at nothing at all — even some of the most preposterous charges imaginable — just to avoid admitting that they made a mistake, which is what everyone knows happened in this case,” said attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg.
“Mr. Garcia is going to be vigorously defending the charges against him,” the attorney said.
The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News. Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.
Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.
The alleged conspiracy spanned nearly a decade and involved the domestic transport of thousands of noncitizens from Mexico and Central America, including some children, in exchange for thousands of dollars, according to the indictment.
Abrego Garcia is alleged to have participated in more than 100 such trips, according to the indictment. Among those allegedly transported were members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13, sources familiar with the investigation said.
MORE: Timeline: Wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador
Abrego Garcia is the only member of the alleged conspiracy charged in the indictment.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, at a Friday afternoon press conference, thanked Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele for “agreeing to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.”
“Our government presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant and they agreed to return him to our country,” Bondi said.
Bondi said that if Abrego Garcia is convicted of the charges, upon the completion of his sentence he will be deported back to his home country of El Salvador.
“The grand jury found that over the past nine years, Abrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring,” Bondi said. “They found this was his full time job, not a contractor. He was a smuggler of humans and children and women. He made over 100 trips, the grand jury found, smuggling people throughout our country.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks as Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche listens during a news conference about Kilmar Abrego Garcia at the Justice Department, June 6, 2025, in Washington.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
In a statement to ABC News, Abrego Garcia’s attorney said that he’s going to keep fighting to ensure Abrego Garcia receives a fair trial.
“From the beginning, this case has made one thing painfully clear: The government had the power to bring him back at any time. Instead, they chose to play games with the court and with a man’s life,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said. “We’re not just fighting for Kilmar — we’re fighting to ensure due process rights are protected for everyone. Because tomorrow, this could be any one of us — if we let power go unchecked, if we ignore our Constitution.”
Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native who had been living with his wife and children in Maryland, was deported in March to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison — despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation to that country due to fear of persecution — after the Trump administration claimed he was a member of the criminal gang MS-13. His wife and attorneys deny that he is an MS-13 member.
The Trump administration has acknowledged in court filings that Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador in March was in error, because it violated a U.S. immigration court order in 2019 that shielded Abrego Garcia from deportation to his native country, according to immigration court records. An immigration judge had determined that Abrego Garcia would likely face persecution there by local gangs that had allegedly terrorized him and his family.
The administration argued, however, that Abrego Garcia should not be returned to the U.S. because he is a member of the transnational Salvadoran gang MS-13, a claim his family and attorneys have denied. In recent weeks, Trump administration officials have been publicizing Abrego Garcia’s interactions with police over the years, despite a lack of corresponding criminal charges.
After Abrego Garcia’s family filed a lawsuit over his deportation, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that ruling on April 10.
Abrego Garcia was initially sent to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison but was believed to have later been transferred to a different facility in the country.
The criminal investigation that led to the charges was launched in April as federal authorities began scrutinizing the circumstances of a 2022 traffic stop of Abrego Garcia by the Tennessee Highway Patrol, according to the sources. Abrego Garcia was pulled over for speeding in a vehicle with eight passengers and told police they had been working construction in Missouri.
According to body camera footage of the 2022 traffic stop, the Tennessee troopers — after questioning Abrego Garcia — discussed among themselves their suspicions that Abrego Garcia might be transporting people for money because nine people were traveling without luggage, but Abrego Garcia was not ticketed or charged.
The officers ultimately allowed Abrego Garcia to drive on with just a warning about an expired driver’s license, according to a report about the stop released last month by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Asked what circumstances have changed since Abrego Garcia was not taken in custody during that traffic stop in Tennessee, Bondi replied, “What has changed is Donald Trump is now president of the United States, and our borders are again secure, and thanks to the bright light that has been shined on Abrego Garcia — this investigation continued with actually amazing police work, and we were able to track this case and stop this international smuggling ring from continuing.”
Asked by ABC News’ Pierre Thomas asked whether this should be seen as resolving the separate civil case in Maryland in which a federal judge ordered the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said, “There’s a big difference between what the state of play was before the indictment and after the indictment. And so the reason why he is back and was returned was because an arrest warrant which was presented to the government and in El Salvador. So there’s, there’s a big difference there as far as whether it makes the ongoing litigation in Maryland moot. I would think so, but we don’t know about this. He just landed today.”
As ABC News first reported last month, the Justice Department had been quietly investigating the Tenessee traffic stop. As part of the probe, federal agents in late April visited a federal prison in Talladega, Alabama to question Jose Ramon Hernandez-Reyes, a convicted felon who was the registered owner of the vehicle Abrego Garcia was driving when stopped on Interstate 40 east of Nashville, sources previously told ABC News. Hernandez-Reyes was not present at the traffic stop.
MORE: Newly released video shows Abrego Garcia’s 2022 Tennessee traffic stop
Hernandez-Reyes, 38, is currently serving a 30-month sentence for illegally re-entering the U.S. after a prior felony conviction for illegal transportation of aliens.
After being granted limited immunity, Hernandez-Reyes allegedly told investigators that he previously operated a “taxi service” based in Baltimore. He claimed to have met Abrego Garcia around 2015 and claimed to have hired him on multiple occasions to transport undocumented migrants from Texas to various locations in the United States, sources told ABC News.
When details of the Tennessee traffic stop were first publicized, Abrego Garcia’s wife said her husband sometimes transported groups of fellow construction workers between job sites.
“Unfortunately, Kilmar is currently imprisoned without contact with the outside world, which means he cannot respond to the claims,” Jennifer Vasquez Sura said in mid-April.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who flew to El Salvador and met with Abrego Garcia shortly after his deportation, said Friday that the Trump administration had “relented” regarding his return.
“After months of ignoring our Constitution, it seems the Trump Admin has relented to our demands for compliance with court orders and due process for Kilmar Abrego Garcia,” Van Hollen posted on X. “This has never been about the man — it’s about his constitutional rights & the rights of all.”
Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. illegally as a teenager in 2012, according to court records. He had been living in Maryland for the past 13 years, and married Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen, in 2019. The couple has one child together.
ABC News’ Laura Romero contributed to this report.
In the full, unedited version of Donald Trump’s recent Meet the Press interview with Kristen Welker—released online by NBC but not aired in full during the broadcast—Trump made several striking remarks that were omitted from the televised segment.
Trump on Meet the Press
Meet the Press
One such moment came when Trump claimed credit for getting Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to remove tariff impact notices from the platform. “I asked him about it and he said I don’t want to do that and he took it off immediately,” Trump said, calling Bezos “a very nice guy” and suggesting a friendly relationship between the two.
Welker: What did you say to Jeff Bezos?
Trump: He’s just a very nice guy. We have a relationship. I asked him about it and he said I don’t want to do that and he took it off immediately. pic.twitter.com/lE4xtTC4lo
The removal of such notices undermines public transparency by severing the direct link between rising consumer prices and Trump’s tariff policies.
Other remarks that were cut from the interview that aired included Trump’s insistence that prices for eggs “were down 87%” under his administration, citing White House Easter egg hunts as anecdotal proof, despite Welker reminding him the price spike was caused by a bird flu outbreak.
Trump: Eggs.. you were the one who asked me. It was the first week. I didn’t even know what you were talking about. Egg prices were so high you couldn’t buy eggs. They didn’t have any eggs.. We had Easter at the WH and we had thousands of eggs and they were down 87%.
Trump also returned to debunked claims about the 2020 election, asserting the results were “rigged” and insisting he “won a lot of court cases” despite losing the vast majority.
Trump: The election was rigged…
Welker: I don’t want to look back. You took your case to court about your allegations..
Trump: There’s no question. The election was rigged. The facts are in and it’s still being litigated.
He went further to suggest that “China is eating the tariffs” rather than U.S. consumers or businesses. That is not the reality.
Trump: What people don’t understand is.. the country eats the tariff, the company eats the tariff and it’s not passed along at all… China is eating the tariffs pic.twitter.com/oC30AQokR0
These unaired statements raise questions about editorial choices in broadcast journalism, especially as Trump continues to air grievances about 60 Minutes for what he claims was an unfairly edited interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. While time constraints are common in televised interviews, withholding full conversations—especially those containing controversial or revealing statements—can fuel partisan claims of media bias.
Releasing full interviews, as MSNBC ultimately did, could help restore public trust and offer a more complete view of political figures’ positions.
Talk about weaponizing the government. tRump seems to think that the DOJ and all agencies work for him personally. The Department of Justice was founded not to be the presidents personal lawyer but the peoples attorneys to protect the rights of the public. The FBI was founded as the countries police not the private cops of tRump to do his dirty work. How far the US has fallen due to these people who think they are the superior race and that they are so great. Hugs
Graham Kates,
Katrina Kaufman
/ CBS News
The Department of Justice wants to stand in for President Trump in his ongoing appeal of a defamation case that could cost him tens of millions of dollars.
Lawyers for the taxpayer-funded agency and Mr. Trump’s personal attorneys said in a filing on April 11 that the Justice Department believes the federal Westfall Act shields Mr. Trump in the case, which has pitted him against the writer E. Jean Carroll.
A federal jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in January 2024, after concluding that Mr. Trump made defamatory statements when denying that he sexually abused Carroll. That award came less than a year after a separate federal jury concluded Trump was liable for sexual abuse, and instructed him to pay her $5 million.
The Justice Department asserts that Mr. Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he made the allegedly defamatory statements about Carroll in 2019, and therefore the court is required to substitute the United States for Mr. Trump in the case. Under the Westfall Act, federal employees are entitled to absolute immunity from personal lawsuits for conduct occurring within the scope of their employment.
Legal scholar James Pfander said Mr. Trump still needs to show that his actions, publicly denying Carroll’s claims, were within the scope of the presidency.
“As a legal issue ultimately for the courts, the [Justice Department’s] certification alone does not decide the question,” said Pfander, a Northwestern School of Law professor.
Pfander noted that the Westfall Act says it permits government employees to petition courts to certify they were acting within the scope of their office “at any time before trial.”
“By allowing an employee to pursue certification but limiting the time to ‘before trial,’ the statute would seem to suggest that a motion to substitute at the appellate stage of the litigation comes too late,” Pfander said.
A longtime advice columnist, Carroll published a book excerpt in New York magazine in 2019 accusing Mr. Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. Mr. Trump denied the allegations and called Carroll a “whack job.” He claimed he had never met Carroll, accused her of “totally lying” and said, “she’s not my type.”
Mr. Trump would go on to repeat similar denials in public appearances, social media posts and depositions.
The Justice Department initially supported Mr. Trump’s effort to have the case dismissed, arguing the Westfall Act protected Mr. Trump from liability because he was acting as a federal employee when he denied Carroll’s allegations.
A lawyer for the department argued in 2021 — while Mr. Trump was out of office after losing the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden — that even though Mr. Trump “made crude and offensive comments in response to the very serious accusations of sexual assault” the law protecting employees from such a suit should be upheld.
The agency reversed its position in July 2023. An official for the Justice Department wrote at the time that the decision factored in the jury’s conclusion in the $5 million case that Mr. Trump was liable for sexual abuse.
“The allegations that prompted the statements related to a purely personal incident: an alleged sexual assault that occurred decades prior to Mr. Trump’s Presidency,” former Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton wrote. “That sexual assault was obviously not job related.”
Paul Figley, a former deputy director of the Justice Department’s Torts Branch, said Boynton’s decision was unexpected.
“I was very surprised by the withdrawal because we always viewed the president as behaving within the scope of office for anything he did,” said Figley, an American University professor emeritus who worked at the Justice Department for more than three decades.
An exhibit included with the case’s latest filing shows that the Justice Department, now under the purview of Mr. Trump, has again reversed course.
“I find that Donald J. Trump was acting within the scope of his office or employment at the time of the incidents out of which the plaintiff’s claims arose,” wrote Kirsten Wilkinson, the director of the agency’s Torts Branch Civil Division.
Columbia Law School professor Caroline Polisi said she believes the decision fits a pattern within the Trump administration.
“This is not at all a surprising move for this Justice Department. Trump has shown time and time again that he considers this DOJ to be his personal attorney,” said Polisi, a federal criminal defense attorney
“On their face, the comments at issue were purely personal in nature, and therefore outside of his scope of duties as president, thus excluding him from governmental immunity,” said Polisi. “However, the fact that the former administration took the same position – at least initially – shows that the argument is not entirely frivolous, and that a court may entertain arguments on the issue.”
The highest ranks of the Justice Department are filled with lawyers who just last year were Mr. Trump’s personal attorneys, but Figley said Wilkinson does not fit that description. He noted she’s risen steadily while serving through multiple administrations, before being appointed director in January.
“That appointment was an obvious choice, she’d been the deputy director in that office for many years, and the previous director retired,” Figley said.
A lawyer for Mr. Trump also argued last year that the case should be dismissed due to a Supreme Court ruling granting presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts”while they are in office.
Roberta Kaplan, an attorney for Carroll, argued in a January brief that the Supreme Court’s ruling did not apply to Carroll’s claims.
“If there were ever a case where immunity does not shield a president’s speech, this one is it,” Kaplan wrote.
Kaplan declined to comment Wednesday on Mr. Trump’s latest move, telling CBS News her response was forthcoming in opposition papers she expects to file next week.
Gill, the son-in-law of notorious cultist Dinesh D’Souza, ran a fleet of clickbait fake news sites and promoted D’Souza’s debunked “2000 Mules” film before being elected in 2024.
Earlier this month Gill introduced a resolution that would replace Ben Franklin with Trump on the $100 bill.
Last month Gill earned national headlines when he called for deporting Rep. Ilhan Omar over of a fake Russian video promoted by Elon Musk.
Gill first appeared here when he called for Trump to seize Greenland and Panama by military force.
His tweet below currently has over 34 million views thanks to it being shared by Elon Musk to his 220 million followers.
Alawieh, who had worked and lived in Rhode Island previously, was detained at least 36 hours, through Friday, and was going to be sent back to Lebanon, the complaint said. Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist, was to start work at Brown University as an assistant professor of medicine.
“Oopsie…Too late,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally who agreed to house about 300 migrants for a year at a cost of $6 million in his country’s prisons, wrote on the social media site X above an article about Boasberg’s ruling. That post was recirculated by White House communications director Steven Cheung.
Prince is the most famous mercenary of the contemporary era and the founder of the now defunct private military company Blackwater. For a time, it was a prolific privateer in the “war on terror,” racking up millions in US government contracts by providing soldiers of fortune to the CIA, Pentagon and beyond.
Now he is a central figure among a web of other contractors trying to sell Trump advisers on a $25 billion deal to privatize the mass deportations of 12 million migrants. Prince also has the ear of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and was a character witness for her Senate confirmation.
Politico first reported on Prince’s deportation pitch to the Trump administration late last month.
Prince, the brother of former Education Sec. Betsy Devos, appeared here in 2023 when he went on trial in Austria for arms trafficking.
In 2022, he appeared here when he told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he could have prevented Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Also in 2022, he told Steve Bannon that the US should be supporting Putin because he hates LGBTQ people.
Later that year, Prince was exposed for having spied on progressive groups.
In 2021, Prince was charging Afghan refugees $6500 for seats on planes doing evacuations.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “orchestrated” the process in the West Wing in tandem with Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem. Few outside their teams knew what was happening.
A federal court’s jurisdiction does *not* stop at the water’s edge. The question is whether the *defendants* are subject to the court order, not *where* the conduct being challenged takes place.Were it otherwise, the government could act lawlessly overseas and courts would be powerless to stop it.
I have so much to say about today’s case, legal analysis, and more.But the most powerful thing today was watching Chase Strangio argue in front of the court as the first trans attorney to do so.You could feel history, and nobody will ever take that away.
I just ran into the main plaintiff and their family in the hallway of the Supreme Court in the skrimetti case today, and we all hugged and now I’m in tears in the press room.I thanked them profusely.Trans people deserve equal protection. We deserve to live like anyone else.
Chase Strangio walks out of the court to cheers after he becomes the first trans attorney to present a case to SCOTUS.Video too big in size but will post later.
I also can't get over the conservative justices favorably citing European laws about transgender health care when they vociferously refuse to consider other nation's laws and traditions when dealing with issues on which the U.S. is an outlier, like gun violence and the death penalty.
Ran into what I assume was one of the far right people in the bathroom line who said “I thought the men’s bathroom was on the other side” at SCOTUS.Thankfully the rest of the line were people who knew me and my reporting and I didn’t even dignify it with a response.
This should be said everywhere. Allowing discrimination like this against trans people undermines bedrock principles of constitutional rights across the board.
Chris is correct. Everyone stop saying landslide or mandate now. And let’s get to work blocking their most extreme plans.[Repost: https://buff.ly/41pxuOu%5D
"Repeat after me: there was no 'landslide'. There was no 'blowout'. There was no 'sweeping' mandate given to Trump by the electorate. The numbers don’t lie."My new Guardian op-ed on the new GOP election lie – and why it's important to rebut it! I brought (lots of) receipts:
"Trump won the crucial blue wall states… by 231,000 votes? So if just 116,000 voters across those three swing states – or 0.7% of the total – had switched from Trump to Harris, it is the vice-president who would have won the electoral college … and the presidency" – me for the Guardian:
“Both Tesla and SpaceX quite likely would not exist as successful businesses if it were not for the use of public funding, either through subsidies, through the electric car industry, or through actual government contracting in the case of SpaceX,” Ramaswamy said in 2022 on a Fox News podcast.
Scottie's Playtime 