Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s Lawyer: Trafficking Charges Must Be Viewed with “Suspicion”

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father who was wrongfully sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in March, is now in federal custody in Tennessee after being returned to the United States over the weekend. He now faces federal criminal charges that he was illegally transporting undocumented immigrants within the U.S. “He’s still far away from what we want, which is for him to be freed and returned to his family,” says Chris Newman, a lawyer for Abrego Garcia’s family and legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. Newman draws connections between the L.A. anti-ICE protests and Abrego Garcia’s first encounter with law enforcement in 2019 at a Home Depot, where a now-fired Maryland police officer accused him of being a potential MS-13 gang member and handed him over to ICE.