NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A representative of the U.S. Attorney’s office testified in federal court on Thursday that the human smuggling case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia was justified while acknowledging that the charges coming two years after a traffic stop in question was “extraordinary.”

Abrego Garcia, whose mistaken deportation has galvanized both sides of the immigration debate, claims that the criminal prosecution is vindictive and pushed by officials from President Donald Trump's administration to punish him after they were forced to bring him back to the United States. He wants the charges dismissed.

While Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran citizen, a court order from 2019 prevents him from being deported to that country. That's because an immigration judge determined he faced danger in El Salvador from a gang that had threatened his family. Abrego Garcia, 30, immigrated to the U.S. illegally as a teenager but has an American wife and child. He has lived and worked in Maryland for years under the supervision of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

After he was deported to El Salvador last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration had to work to bring him back. He was eventually returned to the U.S. only to face criminal charges of human smuggling based on a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty.

Body camera footage from a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer shows a calm exchange with Abrego Garcia after he was pulled over for speeding. There were nine passengers in the car, and the officers discussed among themselves their suspicions of smuggling. However, Abrego Garcia was eventually allowed to continue driving with only a warning.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee Rob McGuire, who was acting U.S. attorney in April 2025, testified that it was his decision to charge Abrego Garcia, and he did so based on the evidence.

“I had previously prosecuted several human smuggling cases,” McGuire testified. When he saw video of the traffic stop, “I was immediately struck by how similar what was being depicted in the body cam was to those investigations.”

Abrego Garcia was carrying nine people in a car without luggage, the car belonged to someone with “a human smuggling background,” and the route was suspicious, among other things, McGuire said.

He said he was in close contact with the deputy attorney general's office about the investigation's progress but said that was common with high-profile cases.

On cross-examination, McGuire admitted that the timing of the charges, more than two years after the traffic stop, was “extraordinary.” McGuire said he had not previously been aware of the stop.

Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent in Charge Rana Saoud, who ran the Nashville region at the time of Abrego Garcia’s deportation, testified Thursday that she first heard of the 2022 traffic stop in April 2025, when someone forwarded her a news article in the Tennessee Star, a conservative online publication. Saoud said she was aware of the publicity around Abrego Garcia, who at that point was still in El Salvador.

Saoud testified that she initiated the investigation and was under no pressure from higher-ups.

“If the facts did not add up, we would have ceased to move forward,” she said. “The case just kept getting stronger.”

On cross-examination, Saoud agreed that the case was not high profile because of the nature of the criminal allegations but because of who the defendant was. “Mr. Abrego was in the news all the time at that point,” she said.

Defense attorney David Patton said that a different HSI office in Baltimore knew of the traffic stop two years earlier but had never charged Abrego Garcia and closed the investigation after his March 2025 deportation. The case was reopened in Baltimore a month later after the Supreme Court decision on Abrego Garcia’s deportation. By the time McGuire was aware of the traffic stop, federal agents with the Baltimore office had already interviewed the owner of the car Abrego Garcia had been driving.

Jose Hernandez Reyes, then incarcerated, told agents he had run a smuggling operation with Abrego Garcia as a driver for him, McGuire said. The same day McGuire learned about the traffic stop from Saoud, Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh emailed him asking to meet about Hernandez Reyes’ testimony.

McGuire emailed Singh regularly with updates on the indictment's progress. He said he did not know if Singh was sharing those updates with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche or Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“I can tell you they never came back to say, ‘Put this in there,’ or ‘Say this,’ or ’Don’t say that’,” he testified.

Pressed about whether he might have felt pressure to prosecute the case, McGuire said, “I’m not going to do something that I think is wrong to keep my job.”

U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw previously found some evidence that the prosecution against Abrego Garcia, who arrived at the courthouse with his wife Thursday morning, “may be vindictive.” The judge said many statements by Trump administration officials “raise cause for concern.” He cited a statement by Blanche that seemed to suggest the Department of Justice charged Abrego Garcia because he won his wrongful-deportation case.

Abrego Garcia's attorneys have been sparring with prosecutors for months over whether officials like Blanche would be required to testify at Thursday's hearing and what emails Department of Justice officials would have to turn over to them. McGuire has argued that he alone made the decision to prosecute, so the motives of other officials were irrelevant.

Crenshaw reviewed many of the disputed documents. In an order that was unsealed in late December, he wrote, “Some of the documents suggest not only that McGuire was not a solitary decision-maker, but he in fact reported to others in DOJ and the decision to prosecute Abrego may have been a joint decision.”