Kilmar Ábrego García, a 29-year-old from El Salvador mistakenly deported in March, has been returned to the US to face prosecution on two federal criminal charges.
He has been accused of participating in a trafficking conspiracy over several years to move undocumented migrants from Texas to other parts of the country.
El Salvador agreed to release Mr Ábrego García after the US presented it with an arrest warrant, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday. His lawyer called the charges “preposterous”.
The White House had been resisting a US Supreme Court order from April to “facilitate” his return after he was sent to a jail in El Salvador alongside more than 250 other deportees.
In a two-count grand jury indictment, filed in a Tennessee court last month and unsealed on Friday, Mr Ábrego García was charged with one count of conspiracy to transport aliens and a second count of unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens.
Bondi said the grand jury had found that Mr Ábrego García had played a “significant role” in an alien smuggling ring, bringing in thousands of illegal immigrants to the US.
The charges, which date back to 2016, allege he transported undocumented individuals between Texas and Maryland and other states more than 100 times.
The indictment also alleges he transported members of MS-13, designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US.
The Trump administration had previously alleged Mr Ábrego García was a member of the transnational Salvadorian gang, which he has denied.
Bondi also accused Mr Ábrego García of trafficking weapons and narcotics into the US for the gang, though he was not charged with any related offences.
He appeared in court for an initial hearing on Friday in Nashville, Tennessee. An arraignment hearing is scheduled 13 June, where US Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes will determine if there are grounds to keep him detained ahead of his trial.
For now, Mr Ábrego García remains in federal custody.
Mr Ábrego García’s lawyers have previously argued that he had never been convicted of any criminal offence, including gang membership, in the US or in El Salvador.
Simon Sandoval Moshenberg, one of his attorneys, called the events an “abuse of power” at a news conference on Friday.
“The government disappeared Kilmar to a foreign prison in violation of a court order,” Mr Moshenberg said. “Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him.”
He added: “This is an abuse of power, not justice. The government should give him a full and fair trial in front of the same immigration judge who heard the case in 2019.”
US President Donald Trump called Mr Ábrego García a “bad guy” while speaking to reporters on Friday, and said the US Department of Justice had made the right decision to return him to face trial.
Mr Ábrego García entered the US illegally as a teenager from El Salvador. In 2019, he was arrested with three other men in Maryland and detained by federal immigration authorities.
But an immigration judge granted him protection from deportation on the grounds that he might be at risk of persecution from local gangs in his home country.
On 15 March, he was deported amid an immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, after it invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law that allows presidents to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy country.
Mr Ábrego García was taken to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador, known for its brutal conditions.
While government lawyers initially said he was taken there as a result of “administrative error”, the Trump administration refused to order his return.
Whether or not the government had to “facilitate” his return to his home in the US state of Maryland became the subject of a weeks-long legal and political battle.
After Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen demanded to see Mr Ábrego García in El Salvador, he was released to a different prison in that country.
Van Hollen reiterated on Friday that “this is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights – and the rights of all”.
“The administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”
El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a close ally of Trump, wrote on social media on Friday that if the administration “request the return of a gang member to face charges, of course we wouldn’t refuse”.
At Mr Ábrego García’s court appearance in Tennessee next Friday, the US will request he be held in pretrial custody “because he poses a danger to the community and a serious risk of flight”, according to the detention motion.
