A federal judge on Friday granted Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s motion to dismiss his indictment in Tennessee, after Abrego argued that he was only charged by the Trump administration because he successfully challenged his illegal removal to El Salvador.

The Trump administration had resisted remedying that illegal removal for months before it finally brought him back to the U.S. in June 2025, where it had criminal charges waiting for him.

“The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution,” U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw wrote in his rare grant of such a motion, which the judge said he didn’t do lightly.

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Jordan Rubin

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.

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• Judge dismisses Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s criminal indictment as vindictive by Trump DOJ