A top official within the Nashville, Tennessee, area’s Department of Justice (DOJ) offices has resigned after the Trump administration charged Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man mistakenly deported from the U.S. earlier this year, with human trafficking.
Abrego Garcia, a noncitizen who has spent nearly half his life living in Maryland, was wrongfully deported this spring from the U.S. to an El Salvador megaprison notorious for human rights violations. Trump officials repeatedly stalled in attempting to return him to the U.S., with federal courts ruling that the White House’s rationale for the delays didn’t hold muster.
After months of claiming they weren’t able to return Abrego Garcia to his family in the U.S. and dubiously alleging that he was a gang member to justify his deportation, the administration finally brought him back to the U.S. over the past weekend. In doing so, however, they also filed federal human trafficking charges against him, which some critics have alleged are based on dubious and circumstantial evidence.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers noted how easy it was for the administration to get their client back to the U.S. after previously claiming they were unable to do so.
“Today’s action proves what we’ve known all along — that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so,” said Andrew Rossman, one of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers.
The recent criminal charges also appear to be a new line of attack against him, another lawyer for Abrego Garcia suggested.
“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,” that lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, said in a statement.
The charges Abrego Garcia now faces stem from a traffic incident in 2022 in which he was driving a vehicle through Tennessee with a group of fellow construction workers — something his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, said he regularly did to ensure that he and his coworkers could make it from one job site to another across the country.
While the officer who made the traffic stop had expressed suspicion of human trafficking, he did not arrest Abrego Garcia and allowed him to leave that night with a warning about an expired driver’s license.
“He was not charged with any crime or cited for any wrongdoing,” Vasquez Sura noted.
Nevertheless, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed the U.S. had enough evidence — which it has not yet publicly revealed — to charge Abrego Garcia with being part of “an alien smuggling ring.”
Bondi also mischaracterized the indictment against Abrego Garcia, claiming that a grand jury had “found that over the past nine years, Abrego Garcia has played a significant role” in the supposed ring they allege him to be a part of.
Grand juries do not exist to make such conclusions. Instead, they are presented with evidence from prosecutors in order to determine whether charges against an individual can first be issued at all, after which a jury trial is held to decide if that evidence is enough to convict a person.
Following Abrego Garcia’s indictment, Ben Schrader, a high-level DOJ official within the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville (where the charges against Abrego Garcia were filed) abruptly resigned from his position.
While Schrader, who ran that office’s criminal division, did not explicitly state that he resigned over the charges, sources told ABC News that his decision was based on concerns that the allegations against Abrego Garcia were politically motivated.
“Earlier today, after nearly 15 years as an Assistant United States Attorney, I resigned as Chief of the Criminal Division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee,” Schrader said in a statement announcing his resignation. “It has been an incredible privilege to serve as a prosecutor with the Department of Justice, where the only job description I’ve ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.”
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), who serves on both the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, expressed doubts over the Trump administration’s claims against Abrego Garcia.
The charges against him should be “regarded with a very hefty dose of skepticism,” Blumenthal said on CNN over the weekend, adding:
The administration has no right to bring charges simply as an offramp, or a face-saver. And now it’s going to have to, in effect, put up and shut up, put its evidence where its mouth is.
“As a prosecutor, as a United States attorney, federal prosecutor, as well as state attorney general, charges are not evidence,” Blumenthal added. “And so far, we’ve seen no evidence.”
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