Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been returned to the U.S. to face federal criminal charges

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whose erroneous deportation to El Salvador became a protracted battle over due process and a test of wills, has been returned to the United States to face human smuggling charges in Tennessee.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday in a news conference that he had landed in the U.S. “to face justice.”

Abrego Garcia has been named in an indictment charging him with transporting within the U.S. people not legally in the country. The two-count indictment, sealed by a Tennessee court last month, alleges that Abrego Garcia participated in a conspiracy over several years to move people from Texas deeper into the country, NBC News has learned.

The two-count indictment alleges that those transported included members of the MS-13 gang and that he worked with co-conspirators.

The Justice Department said that Abrego Garcia used his status in MS-13 to “further his criminal activity.”

“This was his full-time job, not a contractor,” Bondi said. “He was a smuggler of humans and children and women. He made over 100 trips, the grand jury found, smuggling people throughout our country.”

The indictment alleges that from about 2016 to 2025, Abrego Garcia and others conspired to bring migrants illegally to the United States from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador and elsewhere, through Mexico and across the Texas-Mexico border.

Abrego Garcia and a co-conspirator “ordinarily picked up the undocumented aliens in Houston, Texas area” after they had crossed the border. The pair then allegedly would transport “the undocumented aliens from Texas to other parts of the United States to further the aliens’ unlawful presence in the United States,” the indictment said.

In the indictment, the government said Abrego Garcia and six other uncharged and unnamed co-conspirators communicated using cellphones and social media to unlawfully transport the undocumented immigrants.

They allege that Abrego Garcia would hold the cellphones of those he was transporting within the U.S. and would return them at the end of their trip, “they did this to ensure the undocumented aliens could not and would not contact anyone else during the trip,” the government said in the indictment.

The indictment also claims Abrego Garcia and other conspirators would reconfigure vehicles to transport the immigrants and that children would travel on floorboards. On one occasion, the Tennessee Highway Patrol stopped Abrego Garcia while he was driving a Suburban with “an after-market third row of seats placed where a cargo area should be, which was occupied by undocumented passengers.”

The government further alleged that Abrego Garcia and co-conspirators collected financial payments from the immigrants and transferred money between one another to conceal the origin of the payments.

Abrego Garcia’s attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said bringing him back for prosecution “is an abuse of power, not justice.”

“The government disappeared Kilmar to a foreign prison in violation of a court order,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said in a statment. “Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him. This shows that they were playing games with the court all along. Due process means the chance to defend yourself before you’re punished, not after.”

Abrego Garcia’s wife has insisted that he was not involved in criminal activity.

“Kilmar worked in construction and sometimes transported groups of workers between job sites, so it’s entirely plausible he would have been pulled over while driving with others in the vehicle,” his wife previously said in a statement. “He was not charged with any crime or cited for any wrongdoing” at the time.

A federal judge and the U.S. Supreme Court in April ordered the federal government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., but the administration dragged its feet and resisted. At times, the administration insisted that his return was up to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who after refusing to send him back wrote on X Friday that “of course we wouldn’t refuse” the request of the Trump administration.

Bondi said the U.S. presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant and “they agreed to send him back.”

The Trump administration previously agreed to pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison about 300 people it alleged were members of the Tren de Aragua gang for one year.

U.S. officials accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 and gave that as reason to deport him, despite a judge’s order from 2019 barring him from being sent to his home country.

He was taken to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, known for its harsh and brutal conditions. Government attorneys had said he was taken there as a result of “administrative error.”

The Supreme Court ruled in April that Abrego Garcia’s removal was “illegal” and determined that a judge’s order for the administration to facilitate his return was proper.

As calls for his return intensified, the administration doubled down on keeping him incarcerated in El Salvador.

Despite orders to bring him back, the administration stood its ground repeatedly, raising concerns about its defiance of the judicial branch and setting off threats of contempt from the bench.

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration just last week to give hundreds of migrants in El Salvador’s CECOT prison the chance to challenge their detentions and removals.