Mistakenly deported man Abrego Garcia indicted, on way back to US

(Reuters) -Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported from Maryland to El Salvador by the Trump administration, has been indicted on criminal charges and is on his way back to the U.S. to face criminal charges, according to court records and a person familiar with the matter. 

Abrego Garcia was charged in an indictment filed in federal court in Tennessee with conspiring to transport illegal immigrants into the United States.

The indictment was filed on May 21, more than two months after Abrego Garcia's March 15 deportation, court records showed. 

In a statement, Abrego Garcia's lawyer, Andrew Rossman, said it would now be up to the U.S. judicial system to ensure he received due process. 

“Today’s action proves what we’ve known all along — that the administration had the ability to bring him back and just refused to do so," said Rossman, a partner at law firm Quinn Emanuel. 

Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador, despite an immigration judge's 2019 order granting him protection from deportation to El Salvador after finding he was likely to be persecuted by gangs if returned there, court records show.

Critics of President Donald Trump pointed to the erroneous deportation as an example of the excesses of the Republican president's aggressive approach to stepping up deportations. 

Officials countered by alleging that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang. His lawyers have denied that Abrego Garcia was a member of the gang and said he had not been charged with or convicted of any crime. 

His case has also become a flash point for escalating tensions between the executive branch and the judiciary, which has ruled against a number of Trump's policies. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return, with liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor saying the government had cited no basis for what she called his "warrantless arrest."  

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis has since opened a probe into what, if anything, the Trump administration has done to secure his return, after his lawyers accused officials of stonewalling their requests for information. 

(Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones and Luc Cohen; additional reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Sandra Maler)