Filing Details Human Smuggling Evidence Against Abrego Garcia

A “Maryland father.” That’s how the propaganda press described Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien from El Salvador that the Trump administration sought to deport. Despite accusations of MS-13 ties, human smuggling, and domestic abuse, Democrats and their allies in the corporate press turned Abrego Garcia into a national martyr.

But the innocent “Maryland father” narrative is collapsing once again with new details revealed by the Department of Justice about Abrego Garcia.

Garcia was previously deported to El Salvador in March of 2025. Courts later ordered the administration to return Abrego Garcia to the United States after claiming the Trump administration was not allowed to send him back to his native country. Upon his return, he was later indicted for human smuggling “by career prosecutors based on the evidence, the law, and their firm belief that there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Abrego Garcia had committed the offenses charged,” the DOJ said in a statement. A federal judge then dismissed that indictment in May, alleging the prosecution was vindictive.

But that ruling didn’t determine the allegations of human smuggling were false. And now, the DOJ filed an appeal Monday asking the U.S Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to reverse a district court’s ruling and reinstate the case against Abrego Garcia. And despite the propaganda press’ characterization of Abrego Garcia as just an innocent father swept up by a vindictive administration, the DOJ’s brief lays out new evidence supporting human-smuggling allegations.

The case revolves around a November 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee in which Abrego Garcia, according to the brief, was driving a car owned by convicted human smuggler Jose Hernandez Reyes.

“In 2022, Tennessee police stopped a vehicle driven by defendant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien and national of El Salvador, and reported him to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) based on evidence that he was engaged in human smuggling. Among other things, Abrego’s stated route of travel made no sense, and the vehicle was full of passengers who, despite being on a long-distance road trip, had no luggage,” the DOJ said in its statement.

During the sttop, Abrego Garcia called Reyes and allegedly told the responding trooper he was calling “his boss” and that the car was registered to Hernandez Reyes. Reyes later told investigators that Abrego Garcia worked as a driver in his smuggling operation and had Abrego Garcia saved in his phone as “chauffeur.” According to the brief, Abrego Garcia also claimed he was driving from St. Louis to Baltimore, but license plate data shows he had come from Texas and the nine passengers he was transporting allegedly had no luggage despite making a long distance trip.

According to the brief, one unidentified witness who was thought to be credible detailed “her texting relationship with Abrego and his numerous invitations for her to join him on his ‘trips’ even though she was a minor.”

Yet the propaganda press’ reporting on the DOJ’s new appeal has basically hidden all the new and damming information about Abrego Garcia from their readers.

The Guardian all but ignored the new DOJ appeal and all the evidence it lays out, instead reporting Monday that the case was previously dismissed because an inferior court judge decided the DOJ acted with “presumptive vindictiveness.” The article then includes a bunch of quotes from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, along with an immigration advocacy group, accusing the Trump administration of weaponization.

Forbes’ Siladitya Ray failed to include a single piece of evidence offered by the DOJ in her write up headlined “DOJ Asks Court To Reinstate Charges Against Mistakenly Deported Man Kilmar Abrego Garcia.”

CBS News’ Camilo Montoya-Galvez similarly failed to include a single new detail about the DOJ’s charges, instead opening with a paragraph that says “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man wrongfully deported by the Trump administration last year, by reversing a lower court order that found them to be vindictive in nature.” The article emphasizes the previous court ruling accusing the Trump administration of being vindictive without offering insight into what the DOJ now alleges.

But this type of deceptive and biased coverage is unsurprising, given that the media has spent more than a year twisting itself in order to cast Abrego Garcia as a sympathetic “Maryland father” caught up in the evil deportation efforts of the Trump administration.

The New York Times’ Alan Feuer wrote this past May that the dismissal of the criminal case against Abrego Garcia (which the Trump administration is appealing) is an “embarrassing blow to the Trump administration, which made the Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the face of its deportation campaign.” The Times framed the dismissal as a rebuke of politically motivated and “vindictive” cases.

“At the heart of the criminal case against Mr. Abrego Garcia was a traffic stop on a Tennessee highway in 2022 during which he was pulled over and discovered to be driving several Hispanic men, some of whom were in the country illegally. Even though the F.B.I. learned about the stop at the time, it decided not to do anything about it, and Mr. Abrego Garcia was released without charges.”

NPR’s Mariana Bacallao and Scott Simon reported in May that Abrego Garcia was “wrongly deported” to a prison in El Salvador and that a federal judge had “cleared Kimora Abrego Garcia of all criminal charges.”

As the propaganda press’ cover-up for criminal Abrego Garcia continues to fail, they keep trying to find new ways to preserve their carefully crafted narrative about him, this time by just not telling their readers about the new evidence, while in the past just parroting the preferred narrative from a court or Abrego Garcia’s lawyers.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2