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“Maryland Man” Kilmar Abrego Garcia has asked a federal judge to gag Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to prevent them making “baseless public attacks” on him.
“To safeguard his right to a fair trial, Mr. Abrego respectfully renews his earlier requests that the Court order that all DOJ and DHS officials involved in this case, and all officials in their supervisory chain, including [Bondi and Noem], refrain from making extrajudicial comments that pose a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing this proceeding,” Garcia’s lawyers said in a motion filed on Thursday, in Tennessee.
Garcia’s lawyers claim he has been subject to “highly prejudicial, inflammatory and false statements” since his release from prison a week ago.
Secretary Noem has accused Garcia, who entered the US illegally, of being associated with brutal Salvadorean gang MS-13.
“He doesn’t belong here. He won’t be staying here. America is a safer nation without this MS-13 Gangbanger in it,” The Department of Homeland Security said of Abrego Garcia in a post on X on Monday.
Garcia was arrested and deported to El Salvador in March, becoming a cause célèbre for Democrats and the American left in the process. A judge ordered him to be returned to the US.
After returning to the US, Garcia was hit with human-trafficking charges.
Prosecutors claim Garcia made hundreds of trips from the US-Mexico border to deliver illegal aliens across the US.
Garcia is said to have worked “full time” as a people-smuggler, earning as much as $1500 per trip.
Two witnesses testified that smugglers would charge migrants from Central and South America as much as $8,000 for passage into the US. Once in the US, Garcia would transport them across the US to their destinations.
A week ago, Garcia was released from custody in Tennessee, only to be re-arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) almost immediately.
Garcia was told he may be deported to Uganda; although a District Judge has since ruled that the administration is “absolutely forbidden” from removing him from the US until a hearing can be held to allow him to offer a challenge.
In response to his attempt to gag AG Bondi and Secretary Noem, a Department of Homeland Security official told The Hill, “If Kilmar Abrego Garcia did not want to be mentioned by the Secretary of Homeland Security, then he should have not entered our country illegally and committed heinous crimes.”
“Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend this criminal illegal MS-13 gang member who is an alleged human trafficker, domestic abuser, and child predator. The media’s sympathetic narrative about this criminal illegal alien has completely fallen apart, yet they continue to peddle his sob story.”
