Trump's Running Tab in the Abrego Garcia Case

[LetMyPeopleVote]

The administration is cutting deals with felons, driving out federal prosecutors, and threatening to abandon its criminal case—all to avoid admitting error.

🎁Link: Trump’s Running Tab in the Abrego Garcia Case www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

— ljconrad (@ljconrad.bsky.social) 2025-06-28T13:09:59.412Z

Link to tweet

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/06/kilmar-abrego-garcia-tennessee-release/683357/?gift=SCYx-5scVta3-cr_IlgTyVaIICUzz02GOkbL198XbOQ

The Trump administration’s long, belabored campaign to prove that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a gang leader, a terrorist, and an all-around bad guy—not a wrongfully deported Maryland man—has produced some extraordinary legal maneuvers. The administration fought Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador all the way to the Supreme Court, lost, and eventually brought him back to the United States to slap him with criminal charges it had started investigating after it had already sent him to a foreign prison.

But with that criminal case off to a shaky start, the administration is threatening to deport Abrego Garcia again—this time to a country other than his native El Salvador—because the judge has ordered his release while the trial is pending. Having spent months trying to gather evidence against Abrego Garcia, the administration is suggesting it may walk away from it all by sending him to Mexico, Guatemala, or another nation willing to take him......

Some of the most remarkable accommodations appear in the transcript of a June 13 pretrial hearing for Abrego Garcia in Tennessee, where the government is trying to convict him of human smuggling. Under cross-examination by defense attorneys, the government’s lead investigator, the Department of Homeland Security agent Peter Joseph, told the court that his primary cooperating witness—the source of the most damning testimony—is a twice-convicted felon who had been previously deported five times.

Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes, who was presiding over the hearing, did a double take. “Sorry. Deported how many times?” she asked.

Joseph, who confirmed the total, said the cooperator has been moved out of prison to a halfway house and is now awaiting a U.S. work permit. He told the court that a second cooperating witness is seeking similar inducements from the government......

Joseph, the Homeland Security investigator, said cooperating witnesses told him more: that Abrego Garcia transported guns and narcotics, that he sexually abused younger female passengers in his care, and that he routinely endangered underage minors, including his own children, whom he left sitting without seat belts on the floor of the vehicle during lengthy trips from Texas to Maryland. The government made its claims to convince Judge Holmes that Abrego Garcia should remain in federal custody while awaiting his criminal trial.

Holmes was not swayed. The defense attorneys representing Abrego Garcia pointed out that the government was relying on stories transmitted through multiple levels of hearsay—claims made outside court, not under oath—by cooperating witnesses seeking some benefit from the government.

“You’ve got agents going to jails and prisons around the United States right now trying to talk to people who you think might know something about Mr. Abrego?” the federal public defender Dumaka Shabazz asked Joseph, the investigator.

[D. Spaulding]

1. The thin skinned narcissist cannot stomach the idea of admitting he made a mistake.

And there's no way he and his cohorts are going to let Garcia have a moment of freedom to talk to the press, and have their mistake amplified even more. They will do anything to keep that from happening. They'll give up the weak case if they have to, bend or disregard any law; whatever it takes.

[sop]

2. I hope this ends up in a televised jury trial.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

3. They are letting a felon go free in an effort to win a political talking point

To make a "case" against Garcia, the DOJ are letting real criminals go free

Link to tweet

[LetMyPeopleVote]

4. Star witness against Kilmar Abrego Garca was due to be deported. Now he's being freed.

The trump administration/DOJ have been embarrassed by this case. The trump DOJ was forced to bring Garcia back by the courts and so to compensate they made up a case against him. The trial judge rejected that case as being based on double hearsay. It seems that to get even weak witnesses, the trump DOJ are making bad deals to let real criminals go free or not be deported.

Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes is a three-time felon who has been released early from federal prison to a halfway house in exchange for his cooperation in the case.

Link to tweet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/06/28/star-witness-against-kilmar-abrego-garca-was-due-be-deported-now-hes-being-freed

The Trump administration has agreed to release from prison a three-time felon who drunkenly fired shots in a Texas community and spare him from deportation in exchange for his cooperation in the federal prosecution of Kilmar Abrego García, according to a review of court records and official testimony.

Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, 38, has been convicted of smuggling migrants and illegally reentering the United States after having been deported. He also pleaded guilty to “deadly conduct” in the Texas incident, and is now the government’s star witness in its case against Abrego.

The government illegally deported Abrego to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador in March, and stonewalled for weeks after the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return to the United States. Officials flew the Maryland resident back into the country this month, but only after a grand jury had indicted him on charges of migrant smuggling, in part because of Hernandez’s testimony......

Hernandez is among a handful of cooperating witnesses who could help the Trump administration achieve its goal of never letting Abrego walk free in the United States again. In exchange, he has already been released early from federal prison to a halfway house and has been given permission to stay in the U.S. for at least a year.

“Otherwise he would be deported,” Peter Joseph, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent, testified at Abrego’s criminal hearing June 13. The government is also likely to give him a work permit, the agent told the court.....

U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara D. Holmes ruled on June 22 that Abrego was eligible for release from criminal custody, saying the government had failed to prove that he posed a flight risk or a danger to the community. She wrote that she put “little weight” on the claims of Hernandez and other cooperators based on their records and interest in avoiding deportation.