By Luc Cohen
NASHVILLE, Tennessee (Reuters) -Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the migrant wrongly deported to El Salvador by President Donald Trump’s administration only to be returned to the United States to face criminal charges, is due back in court on Wednesday for a judge in Tennessee to set the conditions of his release from jail.
Nashville-based U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes ruled on Sunday that the administration could not continue to detain Abrego, 29, pending trial on two charges accusing him of conspiring with at least five other members of a smuggling ring to bring migrants to the United States illegally.
Abrego, a Salvadoran national who had been living in Maryland, has pleaded not guilty. His case has become emblematic of the Republican president’s aggressive immigration crackdown and the pushback from rights groups.
His lawyers have called the charges an effort by the administration to justify its violation of Abrego’s rights by deporting him to El Salvador despite a 2019 judicial order barring such a move on the grounds that he could face persecution by gangs in his home country.
Holmes scheduled a hearing for Wednesday at 2 p.m. CDT (1900 GMT) after expressing skepticism toward the administration’s allegations against Abrego including the credibility of cooperating witnesses.
Holmes acknowledged in Sunday’s ruling that even if Abrego is released from pre-trial detention, he likely would be taken into immigration custody. But the judge’s finding that the government had not shown that Abrego was dangerous amounted to a rebuke of Trump’s assertion that Abrego is a “bad guy” with a “horrible past.”
“The court will give Abrego the due process that he is guaranteed,” Holmes wrote.
Abrego’s wife, their young son, and her two children from another relationship are U.S. citizens and live in Maryland. He was deported on March 15 and was returned on June 6.
U.S. officials had called his deportation an “administrative error” but initially said they would not bring him back. That raised concerns among Trump’s critics that his administration was disregarding civil liberties and due process in its push to step up deportations.
In a separate civil case, another judge is investigating whether administration officials violated her order, later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, to facilitate Abrego’s return to the United States.
The Justice Department ultimately brought Abrego back to face an indictment returned by a grand jury in Nashville charging him with plotting to bring migrants to the United States illegally and then transporting them from the U.S.-Mexico border to destinations in the country.
According to the indictment, Abrego often picked up migrants in Houston, and made more than 100 trips between Texas and Maryland between 2016 and 2025. In urging Holmes to detain Abrego, prosecutors alleged that he sometimes transported minors and often brought his own young children on the trips to serve as a cover story.
Holmes said she gave little weight to those assertions in part because they came from cooperating witnesses seeking reduced sentences in criminal cases or relief from deportation, including the leader of a human smuggling operation who has been deported five times and convicted of felonies twice.
“Each cooperating witness upon whose statements the government’s argument for detention rests stands to gain something,” the judge wrote.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in Nashville, Tennessee; Editing by Will Dunham)
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