Emails provided to Congress by a whistleblower and 15-year veteran of the Justice Department reveal that administration officials went to striking lengths to prop up the claim that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a “leader” of the MS-13 gang—even as President Trump was coming under intense pressure to return him from El Salvador after wrongfully deporting him.
The emails—which The New Republic obtained in advance of their scheduled release Thursday—deepen our understanding of the adminisration’s extraordinary mishandling of Abrego Garcia’s case. They show in fresh detail how officials sought to create the impression that Abrego Garcia was a dangerous criminal before having any evidence to back up the claim, which has since proven to be unsupported.
The emails were provided to Congress by Erez Reuveni, a 15-year veteran of the Justice Department who was fired this spring after expressing doubts in court about the rendition of Abrego Garcia to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious megaprison. Abrego Garcia—who had been living in Maryland under a form of protected status granted by an immigration judge in 2019—was deported on March 15 due to an admitted “error.”
But Trump refused to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States for months—even defying a Supreme Court order to “facilitate” his return—and justified all this largely by citing his supposed MS-13 status. The administration finally brought him back in early June, only to bring new criminal charges against him for smuggling migrants.
On June 24, Reuveni filed a whistleblower complaint to the Justice Department’s inspector general and to the Senate and House judiciary committees, alleging extensive misconduct inside DOJ. The complaint’s most explosive, widely covered charge was that a top DOJ leader, Emil Bove, told officials that in deporting migrants under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, they may have to ignore court orders stopping the removals and tell the courts “fuck you.”
But the whistleblower complaint also detailed internal deliberations over Abrego Garcia’s case, and this part is also damning. The newly released emails—submitted by Reuveni’s attorneys to Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, in response to Durbin’s queries—sharpen our knowledge of this part of the story.
For instance, one key exchange occurred on March 31, when the government was submitting a brief in litigation over Abrego Garcia’s fate. Up to this point, the emails show, ICE had declared Abrego Garcia was in MS-13, and officials were scrambling to pin down the basis for that determination.
In the March 31 exchange, James Percival, senior counselor to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, was debating with other top officials—at DHS, DOJ, and State—what could be said to the court about Abrego Garcia. One of those officials was Reuveni.
“Can we say the following?” Percival asked, then listed several things he’d like the administration to say about Abrego Garcia, one being: “This guy is a leader of MS-13.”
“If we can get a declaration to that effect, yes,” Reuveni answered. This meant the assertion could not be made without a facts-and-evidence-based declaration from ICE on Abrego Garcia’s status.
In other words, top DHS officials apparently were pushing to characterize Abrego Garcia as an MS-13 “leader” before any evidence of this had appeared. And Reuveni expressly warned against doing this absent such evidence.
Subsequently in that chain, an ICE official (whose name is redacted) answered Percival’s question about whether it’s OK to call Abrego Garcia an MS-13 “leader.”
“I have not found anything indicating ‘leader,’ but I’ll keep looking,” the ICE official wrote, meaning that the hunt for such evidence would continue.
It never materialized. That ICE official did identify Abrego Garcia as a “verified member” of MS-13, based on a formal declaration which at this point had been provided by ICE.
But this too would ultimately prove to be lacking in evidence. That claim was based on a ruling by a judge early in the 2019 proceedings to deport him (resulting in him receiving protected status) after he’d been arrested in Maryland the first time and transferred to ICE.
But that ruling rested on “double hearsay,” on paperwork filed by a Maryland cop after Abrego Garcia’s 2019 arrest that cited an unnamed confidential source, and neither the cop nor the source were cross-examined. The cop was subsequently suspended and indicted for serious professional misconduct on an unrelated case.
None of this stopped top administration officials and Trump himself from continuing to recklessly call Abrego Garcia a gang member and a terrorist too many times to count. Vice President JD Vance even described Abrego Garcia as a “high-level gang member in MS-13,” long after these internal emails showed the administration knew it had no evidence for the “leader” claim.
Here’s Percival’s original email, courtesy of a document supplied by Durbin’s office:
Here’s Reuveni’s response to Percival:
And this is from the unnamed ICE official’s response to Percival (the “declaration” is the aforementioned ICE statement on Abrego Garcia’s status from top ICE official Robert Cerna):
Note that in the March 31 email, Percival also asked whether it was OK to assert that Abrego Garcia was not “in immediate danger” in CECOT. As Durbin’s office notes, this sought permission to make the “unsupported” assertion that Abrego Garcia was safe in the Salvadoran prison without “assurances” to that effect. Indeed, the emails show Reuveni prodding other officials for guarantees of Abrego Garcia’s safety and getting little back.
This all looks even worse now that Abrego Garcia has confirmed that he was tortured and beaten there.
According to Reuveni’s complaint, he continued raising concerns with top officials—at DOJ, DHS, and the State Department—about the lack of evidence supporting the MS-13 claim. And the emails show Reuveni sharply warning them that failing to bring Abrego Garcia back could have terrible legal consequences and would create “very bad law.”
After all this, Reuveni refused to sign a legal brief that again charged Abrego Garcia with membership in MS-13, a brief Reuveni believed lacked evidentiary support, according to the complaint. Soon after, he was placed on administrative leave for “failing to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.” His real offense was demanding that the administration stick to the facts on Abrego Garcia.
This case stinks from top to bottom. Trump and his propagandists relentlessly claimed that only El Salvador could decide whether Abrego Garcia would be returned. Then the White House suddenly revealed that it could return him—but only when the administration had amassed a supposed case for prosecuting him in Tennessee for migrant smuggling.
What’s more, right after that indictment was secured, another senior prosecutor in the Tennessee office abruptly resigned, reportedly due to concerns that this prosecution too was tainted.
Even worse, in that prosecution, DOJ has agreed to release a serious and violent felon from custody and allow him to remain in the U.S. to secure his cooperation as a witness against Abrego Garcia. Trump, then, is apparently releasing a known dangerous offender, simply because Abrego Garcia must be found guilty of something to show that Trump was right about him all along—that he is a dangerous criminal.
The emails advance the story in another way. After the whistleblower complaint broke, DOJ dismissed Reuveni’s claims as “utterly false.” But as Durbin noted in a statement, these new emails “clearly substantiate” the complaint.
“These records submitted to Congress show exactly why Erez Reuveni spoke up, and why DOJ fired him for it,” said Andrea Meza of the Government Accountability Project, one of the lawyers representing Reuveni. “He refused to break the law for political officials who violated court orders and sent a man to be tortured.”
The White House’s unceasing legal and propaganda campaign against this one day laborer from Maryland has constituted an extraordinary abuse of power. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of how corrupt it has been—and what we ultimately learn will surely get a whole lot darker.
