A Tennessee judge is scheduled to hear arguments about whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia can be released from jail pending the outcome of a federal trial on human smuggling charges.

A Tennessee judge is scheduled to hear arguments Friday about whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia can be released from jail pending the outcome of a trial on human smuggling charges.

In a motion asking U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes to order Abrego Garcia detained, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee Rob McGuire described him as both a danger to the community and a flight risk. Abrego Garcia’s attorneys disagree. They point out that he was already wrongly detained in a notorious Salvadoran prison thanks to government error, and argue that due process and “basic fairness” require him to be set free.

Abrego Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador who had been living in the United States for more than a decade before he was wrongfully deported in March. The expulsion violated a 2019 U.S. immigration judge’s order that shielded him from deportation to his native country because he likely faced gang persecution there.

    • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
      14·
      19 days ago

      Imagine how Garcia feels

      SIMON SANDOVAL-MOSHENBERG: His head is spinning. I mean, he’s really surprised. He doesn’t understand what’s going on. He understood that his case was over and won in 2019, when the immigration judge issued him an order of protection and allowed him to be released from ICE custody. He got a work permit. He was renewing it year after year. He understood that his problems were behind him.

      And then, all of a sudden, one day out of nowhere, he gets pulled over in his car, taken into custody, finds himself in El Salvador, the one country where the judge had ordered he could not be sent. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he’s meeting with a U.S. senator. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he’s being flown back to United States on a private jet and, you know, is being told that his name and his face are known around the world. You know, it’s almost like one of those movies where someone wakes up out of a coma.

      MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: I was going to ask to what extent he is aware that he has become something of a household name in the U.S.

      SANDOVAL-MOSHENBERG: Yeah, he didn’t have an understanding because he was held completely incommunicado in both of the prisons that he was in, in El Salvador. That is one of the principal human rights violations, is that there’s no access to legal counsel, not even a phone call. We sent a lawyer down three times to try to visit with him, and that lawyer was not allowed to visit with him. So he had no idea…

      https://www.npr.org/2025/06/12/nx-s1-5428138/what-happens-next-for-a-man-at-the-center-of-trumps-immigration-crackdown (arc)