Lawyers for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who was brought back from a wrongful expulsion to El Salvador only to face a second deportation, asked a federal judge on Thursday to impose a gag order on members of the Trump administration. The order would bar the officials from making “inflammatory” public statements about Mr. Abrego Garcia.
In a 15-page motion filed in Federal District Court in Nashville, the lawyers said that officials in President Trump’s Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security had been assailing Mr. Abrego Garcia in ways that could taint a potential pool of jurors and abridge his right to a fair trial. The motion specifically mentioned Attorney General Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary.
“For months, numerous representatives of the same federal government that is responsible for prosecuting this case have publicly disparaged Mr. Abrego’s character and reputation,” the lawyers wrote. The officials, they added, had “distorted the events and evidence underpinning his case to the public; misrepresented his criminal record; disseminated false, irrelevant, and inflammatory claims; and expressed the opinion that he is guilty of the crimes charged.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia is facing charges in Nashville of having taken part in a criminal conspiracy to smuggle undocumented immigrants across the United States beginning in 2016. That case is separate from civil cases he has brought in Maryland challenging his wrongful deportation to El Salvador in March and his more recent possible expulsion to Uganda.
The gag order request on Thursday came after Mr. Trump and several of his aides had attacked Mr. Abrego Garcia in a variety of ways, tarring him as a wife beater, a pedophile, a member of the street gang MS-13 and a terrorist. Federal judges who have seen have the evidence against him in his criminal case have questioned the allegations of his gang ties as “fanciful” and have formally ruled that he is not a danger to the public.
By asking to limit the public assaults against their client, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers were effectively asking Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., who is overseeing the case, to keep the matter focused on the facts and law.
That has not been how the Trump administration has handled the criminal case, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said. In their motion for a gag order, they argued that almost from the moment their client sued the Trump administration in March for deporting him to El Salvador in violation of a court order, Trump officials “have vilified him in the media.”
That vilification, the lawyers said, has continued.
Just last week, for instance, when Mr. Abrego Garcia was freed from custody on the criminal charges he was facing in Tennessee, Ms. Noem, the homeland security secretary, issued a statement referring to him as an “MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser and child predator.”
That same day, the lawyers said, as Mr. Abrego Garcia was arrested again by federal immigration officials, a White House spokeswoman issued a similar statement, calling him “a criminal illegal alien, wife-beater and an MS13 gang member facing serious charges of human smuggling.”
Mr. Trump himself has joined in the attacks, falsely claiming this spring that Mr. Abrego Garcia had tattoos on his hand proving he was a member of MS-13.
This week, Mr. Trump declared that Mr. Abrego Garcia was an “animal” who had “beat the hell out of his wife,” a comment Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers noted in their motion. While it is true that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife had sought orders of protection against him years ago, she never pressed charges and has since supported him vocally in his efforts to fight his criminal case and the efforts to re-deport him.
The “pièce de résistance,” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers added in the gag order request, was a cartoon of their client posted on the White House’s official X account, with “MS-13” written beneath it.
“The government’s ongoing barrage of prejudicial statements severely threaten — and perhaps have already irrevocably impaired — the ability to try this case at all — in any venue,” the lawyers wrote. “If the government is allowed to continue in this way, it will taint any conceivable jury pool by exposing the entire country to irrelevant, prejudicial, and false claims about Mr. Abrego.”
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