AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana.
The indictment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia led to the resignation of a top federal prosecutor, according to a report by ABC News.
Abrego Garcia, a citizen of El Salvador living illegally in Maryland with his wife and children, was deported in March and sent to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, abbreviated CECOT, a notorious maximum security prison established by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele that is well-documented to be a cesspool of human rights abuses. In multiple court filings, at least three separate Trump administration officials have conceded that Abrego Garcia had been mistakenly deported because of an “administrative error.”
The case has captured national attention amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, getting all the way to the Supreme Court and igniting debates about constitutional rights and due process.
ABC News reported Friday afternoon that Abrego Garcia was being transported back to the U.S., and a two-count criminal indictment, originally filed under seal in Tennessee on May 21, would be waiting for him when he arrived.
The two counts in the
The indictment accuses Abrego Garcia of being “a member and associate of the transnational criminal organization” known as MS-13, and that he and the other co-conspirators “knowingly and unlawfully transported thousands of undocumented aliens who had no authorization to be present in the United States, and many of whom were MS-13 members and associates,” and also “occasionally and simultaneously transported firearms illegally purchased in Texas for distribution and resale in Maryland.”
According to ABC News, “[t]he decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee.”
“Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons,” sources told ABC News.
Schrader was the chief of the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and spent 15 years working there. He posted an announcement about his resignation on LinkedIn right around the time that Abrego Garcia’s indictment was filed:
Earlier today, after nearly 15 years as an Assistant United States Attorney, I resigned as Chief of the Criminal Division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee. It has been an incredible privilege to serve as a prosecutor with
the Department of Justice, where the only job description I’ve ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons. I wish all of my colleagues at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and across the Department the best as they seek to do justice on behalf of the American people.
The indictment was signed by Robert McGuire as acting U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee. The Nashville Banner reported back in February that McGuire had “inherited” the job “through a series of events he said he had never anticipated,” when Henry Leventis, who held the job for almost two years, announced his pending resignation last September in advance of the presidential election. Tom Jaworski stepped into the role as acting U.S. attorney with McGuire as his deputy but then he resigned just a few short months later.
“Here I am, kind of the accidental acting U.S. attorney,” said McGuire.
The Banner article noted that McGuire was a Democrat and believed he “isn’t likely to get that phone call from the Trump administration” officially appointing him to the job, and said he didn’t want it, but he did demur from questions about some of the president’s political moves regarding the Justice Department:
Every day since Jan. 20 has produced evidence that this is not a typical presidential transition, with Trump flooding the
zone with executive orders, threatening retribution against perceived enemies and deputizing the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, to order mass firings of government workers. But McGuire deflected the notion that this is an extraordinary period from the perspective of his office, framing recent events as in line with the ebbs and flows that come with being a prosecutor under various presidential administrations.Asked about Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 rioters — several of whom were prosecuted in the Middle District of Tennessee — McGuire noted Biden’s last-minute pardons, which included two people he’d prosecuted. He didn’t personally work on any of the Jan. 6 cases, but said that prosecutors ultimately have to accept such decisions that are above their pay grade.“We’re like, ‘well, he’s the president and I’m not,’” he said. “He decided to pardon this person and whether I agree with it or not, it’s not up to me. I did my job. I prosecuted the case and however someone decides to handle that is up to them. Our job is to follow the law and the evidence and that’s what we’ll continue to do as well as we can.”
Schrader is not the only notable federal prosecutor who has resigned since Trump’s second term began over diverging views on the proper role of their office.
Danielle Sassoon, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned in February and accused the Trump
A few days later, Denise Cheung, the top criminal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington D.C., resigned after her Trump-appointed superiors asked her investigate spending at the Environmental Protection Agency and freeze bank funds for grants issued under President Joe Biden,