Trump Team Scrambles for New Reason to Keep Abrego Garcia Deported
Donald Trump has repeatedly stonewalled on Abrego Garcia’s case.

The Trump administration isn’t rushing to bring home Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident whom the White House mistakenly shipped to El Salvador on the basis of his alleged involvement with the transnational Salvadoran gang MS-13. Instead, they seem intent on finding enough evidence to keep him out of the country for good.
The Justice Department has been quietly investigating a 2022 Tennessee traffic stop involving Abrego Garcia, and recently spoke with an Alabama inmate—Jose Ramon Hernandez-Reyes—who it believed had potential connections to the 29-year-old, ABC News reported Tuesday.
At the time of the traffic violation, Abrego Garcia was driving Hernandez-Reyes’s car. Abrego Garcia was ticketed for speeding. He had eight passengers in the vehicle and told officers that they had been working construction in Missouri, according to ABC.
Hernandez-Reyes reportedly told investigators that he operated a “taxi service” in Baltimore. Sources familiar with the conversation told ABC that Hernandez-Reyes said he met Abrego Garcia in 2015 and sometimes hired Abrego Garcia to transport undocumented immigrants from Texas to other areas of the country.
It’s not clear if Hernandez-Reyes’s testimony is enough to charge Abrego Garcia, but what is plain is that the White House is not prioritizing his return home.
“The interview of Hernandez-Reyes, however, appears to be a new and aggressive step in the government’s efforts to gather potentially incriminating information about Abrego Garcia’s background–even as it resists calls for him to be provided typical protections to respond to such accusations through the American legal system,” according to ABC News.
Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. illegally more than a decade ago but was allowed to remain in the U.S. and evade deportation back to El Salvador when an immigration judge ruled in October 2019 that a return to his home country could expose him to violence or persecution from a local gang, Barrio 18. Abrego Garcia was never charged with a crime, and the only alleged tie between the construction worker and MS-13 stemmed from a 2019 report of a since-fired Maryland police officer. The report also did not definitively link Abrego-Garcia to the gang.
Donald Trump himself appears confused about Abrego Garcia’s connection to Latin American gangs. The president entered into a terse exchange with ABC News last week when he insisted that a doctored photo of supposed gang tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s knuckles was real. Experts say the photo was obviously photoshopped.
Trump administration officials acknowledged in court filings last month that Abrego Garcia’s forced exit from the country was an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court has ordered the executive branch to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., but the White House has since contested that ruling, arguing that Abrego Garcia “will never live” in America again.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has derided the idea that he would return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. as “preposterous,” protesting that he does not have the authority to remove “terrorists” from prisons.
Despite that, Trump has claimed that he does actually have the power to bring Abrego Garcia home—but that he won’t do so.