A federal judge overseeing Kilmar Abrego García’s criminal case in Tennessee ordered officials at the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice to refrain from making damaging statements about him.
“DOJ and DHS employees who fail to comply with the requirement to refrain from making any statement that ‘has a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing’ this criminal proceeding may be subject to sanctions,” U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw wrote.
In his memorandum opinion on Monday, Judge Crenshaw stated that government officials, including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, have made “out-of-court statements that are troubling, especially when many of them are exaggerated, if not simply inaccurate,” specifically citing statements that Abrego García is a member of MS-13.
The prejudicial statements included comments about Abrego Garcia’s character, reputation and criminal record, Crenshaw said. He added that Trump officials violated a local court rule limiting comments by government employees related to an ongoing criminal case and ordered the U.S. attorney’s office for the Middle District of Tennessee to notify Justice Department and DHS employees about the rule.
In a separate order, the federal judge ordered the government to submit sealed documents to the court about its change of position from “deport but not prosecute” to “process and then deport.”
Crenshaw acknowledged that in a normal case, the government would be right to say that internal documents revealing the motivations behind a prosecution would not be discoverable. But, he said, “this is not an ordinary case.”
“Abrego has established a reasonable probability that his prosecution was motivated, at least in part, in retaliation for having exercised his constitutional rights in his immigration case in Maryland,” Judge Crenshaw wrote.
Kilmar Abrego García attends a protest rally at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Baltimore, August 25, 2025, to support Abrego García.
Stephanie Scarbrough/AP
The judge went on to say that Robert McGuire, the acting actor The U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee did not answer certain questions about the prosecution of Abrego García in a supplemental affidavit he filed.
“How did the Abrego case land on your desk and why did it appear on April 27, 2025, when DHS had previously closed the case on April 1, 2025?” Crenshaw wrote in a document Monday. “Cases don’t magically appear on prosecutors’ desks.”
Judge Crenshaw added that the motivations of the people who “place the file” on the prosecutor’s desk are “very relevant” when considering a motion to dismiss for vindictive prosecution.
The Tennessee judge also ordered the government to produce all emails between the Deputy Attorney General’s Office and McGuire’s office from earlier this year regarding the prosecution of Abrego García.
Two days of hearings on the case are scheduled next week.
Abrego García, a Salvadoran who had been living in Maryland with his wife and children, was deported in March to El Salvador’s CECOT megaprison, despite a 2019 court order prohibiting his deportation to that country for fear of persecution, after the Trump administration claimed he was a member of the criminal gang MS-13, which his family and lawyers deny.
he was brought back to the US in June to face human trafficking charges in Tennessee, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
After being released to his brother’s custody in Maryland pending trial, he was arrested again by immigration authorities and is currently being held in a detention center in Pennsylvania.
Judge Xinis, who has been supervising the Abrego García case immigration case in Maryland, there was previously the government banned expel him from the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a court notice Friday that the West African nation of Liberia had agreed to accept Abrego García, after the agency previously indicated that it planned to deport Abrego García to Eswatini or Uganda.
