The Trump administration is prosecuting Kilmar Ábrego García for the crime of winning his freedom back.
The government is asking a court to let it punish a man for defeating it in the Supreme Court. The Department of Justice has appealed to the Sixth Circuit to reinstate human smuggling charges — charges a federal judge already dismissed as vindictive. Judge Waverly Crenshaw Jr found the indictment’s timing, the attorney general’s public statements, and sustained oversight by senior DOJ officials had “thoroughly tainted” the case. The government’s response is to appeal and try again.
Here is the man the government wants back in its courtroom. He is thirty years old. He fled gang extortion in El Salvador at sixteen, settled in Maryland with his citizen wife and children, and reported to ICE check-ins on the schedule ICE gave him. He had no criminal record in either country. When the Trump administration deported him to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador — a detention facility the government of El Salvador runs as an anti-terrorism showpiece — it did so in defiance of court orders protecting him from removal. The Supreme Court told the government to bring him home. Three months after the deportation, on the Court’s order, Kilmar Ábrego García was returned to the United States. The smuggling charges had been waiting — a 2022 traffic stop repackaged as a federal indictment — and in May a Nashville federal judge found the prosecution vindictive and dismissed the case. The government has appealed. The man the government was forced to bring home has now been dragged back into a Nashville federal courtroom to defend himself against the officials whose conduct he exposed.
The government says career prosecutors brought the case based on evidence and law — “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” “no vindictive motive,” the dismissal an “unwarranted intrusion” into the executive’s powers. The judge who heard the evidence found the case “thoroughly tainted.” The attorney general had publicly commented on the prosecution before the indictment was returned. Senior DOJ officials oversaw it personally. And when the court invited the government to put its actual decision makers — including the attorney general — under oath and explain their motives, the government refused to call them. A party that will not swear to its own motives has already confessed. The lawyers for Ábrego García called the appeal “flat wrong.” They are right, and the government knows it. Ama Frimpong of We Are Casa, who has spent years walking families through this system and has no reason to flatter either side, called the prosecution “nothing more than a political vendetta.” She is not wrong either.
Listen to the gravity of that language — “career prosecutors,” “on the evidence, on the law,” “firm belief” of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It is the most sacred sentence an office can say about itself, and the office is saying it about a man who was never charged with anything anywhere, who was grabbed while doing exactly what he was told, who had to be rescued from a foreign dungeon by his own country’s highest court. The district judge was not certain. He said it plainly: this is what retaliation looks like when it is wearing a pinstripe suit.
This is the oldest move of the powerful — to dress the punishment of the person who wins as the dutiful enforcement of the law. It is what the men advising Pilate did, handing over an innocent man in the name of order. It is what a regime does when it has been shamed before the whole world by a single man’s legal victory and decides the victory itself is the crime it must punish. The indictment is not about a 2022 traffic stop. The indictment is about March 2025, and about the fact that he came home. The prophet Isaiah gave this its name twenty-eight hundred years ago: Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.
“You tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy.” The weightier matter here is not whether a traffic stop from 2022 supports a smuggling indictment. The weightier matter is that the indictment appeared after the man won in court, brought by the officials whose conduct he exposed, and a judge named it vindictive.
The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you. I was a stranger and you did not welcome me. In El Salvador, you imprisoned a man whose only offense was crossing a line on a map to reach work and family. When the courts told you that was unlawful, you brought criminal charges — not because the traffic stop demanded prosecution, but because the deportation demanded revenge. This is what the prophets called out: a nation that heals the wound of its people lightly, calling vindictive prosecution justice and cruelty dressed in legal clothing.
I have sat with families rebuilt after deportation orders were lifted. I know the particular weight of a government that cannot bear to lose — that, having wronged a man, decides to punish him for exposing the wrong. The church I belong to has blessed enforcement machinery. Our parishes have endorsed the system that imprisons the people we claim to serve. I confess that — and the confession does not soften the indictment. It earns it. The machinery that does this is not new, and it is not one party’s invention. It is the oldest habit of organized power: to use the institutions we trust — the courts, the prosecutors, the solemn language of evidence and law — to make the weak pay for having been right. Every generation of this country has watched its government reach for a legal pretext to hurt the one who fought back and won. We are part of that country. We built the culture in which an immigration violation is treated as a reason to disappear a man, and in which winning your case back is treated as a reason to investigate him. The climate that made this possible is one we helped to make.
But you — the lawyers who filed this appeal, the prosecutors who signed the papers, the officials who leaned over the desks — you are not a machine. You are persons. You rose in a tradition, or at least an office, that tells you a prosecutor’s duty is to do justice, not to win. You know the facts of this man’s case, because the record contains them. Nothing in that record says “evidence.” Everything in it says “he beat us, and we cannot bear it.” You have the power the men of Cecot do not: you can refuse. No one is obligated to obey an order against the law of God, and the law of God is older than the Sixth Circuit — it says you shall not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt, and it says that what you do to the prisoner and the stranger, you do to Christ.
Romero begged the soldiers to refuse their orders. He did not ask them to understand the legal basis for the killing. He named what the killing was and told them to stop. The killing here is slower — months inside the CECOT anti-terrorism prison, a citizen wife and small children kept from their husband and father, a man who already won once forced to fight the government again on its terms and its timeline — but it comes with a filing number, and the structure is the same: a government using the authority it holds to punish the person who demonstrated that authority was wrongly exercised.
Drop the appeal. Let him live with his wife and children. The court of this country has already said what the deal is worth. Win your case, and you will have proved exactly what the judge said you were doing. Lose it, or better, end it — and a man who was kidnapped by his own government and sent to a torture prison gets to go home, the door of return stands open for you, and the shame of this episode is one degree less than it might have been. He came back from Cecot. You do not have to send him anywhere again.