A federal judge on May 22, 2026 tossed out the criminal case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, finding that prosecutors did not overcome the presumption that the human smuggling charges were brought in retaliation for his successful challenge to his deportation. U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw granted Abrego Garcia’s effort to dismiss the indictment after a nearly six-hour hearing in February and said the government had not rebutted the claim of vindictive prosecution.
Crenshaw said the court did not reach the decision lightly and concluded that the objective evidence showed the case would not have been brought if Abrego Garcia had not prevailed in his fight over removal to El Salvador. The judge wrote that the executive branch closed its investigation into the November 2022 Tennessee traffic stop, then reopened it only after Abrego Garcia succeeded in vindicating his rights. The ruling wipes out two counts of human smuggling that were filed last year after state highway patrol officers stopped him in Tennessee and found numerous people in his vehicle.
The case had grown out of an episode that started long before the courtroom fight. In November 2022, state highway patrol pulled over Abrego Garcia in Tennessee and discovered the passengers in his vehicle. He pleaded not guilty. Years later, after he was removed from the United States in March 2025 and flown to El Salvador, the same traffic stop became the basis for the criminal indictment that federal prosecutors later pursued.
That deportation turned into a separate and far more public legal battle. An immigration judge had already granted Abrego Garcia legal status that barred immigration authorities from deporting him to his home country, but he was nevertheless sent to a notorious supermax prison in El Salvador. A Trump administration official later acknowledged that the removal was a mistake. Abrego Garcia filed a civil lawsuit in Maryland, and a federal judge ordered the administration in April 2025 to facilitate his return to the United States.
The government resisted bringing him back for months before eventually returning him to face criminal charges. He has since been held on separate occasions by federal authorities in Tennessee and immigration officials in Maryland, and he has remained out of immigration custody for several months while the cases moved forward. The Justice Department’s decision to reopen the investigation after the civil suit became central to Crenshaw’s ruling, which said the sequence of events supported Abrego Garcia’s claim that the prosecution was retaliatory.
The ruling also sharpens the question of how the government handled a case that was first closed and then revived only after Abrego Garcia beat back his deportation. Robert McGuire, the prosecutor in the case, argued that the evidence pointed to Abrego Garcia having committed a crime and that it was his decision to prosecute Abrego Garcia and no one else's. Crenshaw was not persuaded, and on Thursday he turned that disagreement into a dismissal that leaves the government without the indictment it had used to justify keeping the case alive.
