(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday it was the Department of Justice, not him, that made the decision to bring back to the U.S. a man mistakenly deported from Maryland to El Salvador.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was flown back to face criminal charges of transporting illegal immigrants within the U.S., Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday.
His return marked an inflection point in a case seized on by critics of Trump’s immigration crackdown as a sign that his administration was disregarding civil liberties in its push to step up deportations of migrants.
“Well, that wasn’t my decision. The Department of Justice decided to do it that way, and that’s fine,” Trump told NBC News in an interview when asked about Abrego Garcia’s return.
Trump added that he had not spoken to El Salvador President Nayib Bukele about the move.
Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran whose wife and young child in Maryland are U.S. citizens, appeared in federal court in Nashville on Friday evening.
His arraignment was set for June 13, when he will enter a plea, according to local media reports. Until then, he will remain in federal custody.
If convicted, he would be deported to El Salvador after serving his sentence, Bondi said. The Trump administration has said Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang, an accusation that his lawyers deny.
Abrego Garcia was deported on March 15, more than two months before the charges were filed. He was briefly held in a mega-prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, despite a U.S. immigration judge’s 2019 order barring him from being sent to the Central American nation because he would likely be persecuted by gangs.
Trump said he thought it would be “a very easy case” against Abrego Garcia, who he accused of having a “horrible record of abuse” of women.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, has called the criminal charges “fantastical.”
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil and Michael Martina; Editing by Paul Simao)
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