Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the illegal immigrant the Trump administration deported to El Salvador, was driving an SUV owned by a convicted human smuggler when he was pulled over by police in Tennessee in 2022, according to a new report.
The SUV was owned by Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, who was convicted in 2020 of smuggling illegal immigrants into the U.S. and later deported, Just the News reported this week. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security confirmed with The New York Post on Wednesday.
Abrego Garcia, who is also suspected of being an MS-13 gang member, had eight other people but no luggage in the car when he was pulled over while driving from Texas to Maryland.
Abrego Garcia, 29, was deported last month back to El Salvador, which led to lawsuits by liberal advocacy groups. The U.S. Supreme Court said in an order earlier this month the government should “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. after being wrongly deported despite his illegal status.
The Trump administration is fighting multiple other lawsuits for detaining and deporting illegal immigrants suspected of being members of Tren de Aragua and MS-13, which are both designated foreign terrorist organizations, using the Alien Enemies Act of 1789.
DHS documents state that the officer who pulled Abrego Garcia over suspected it was a “human trafficking incident.” Abrego Garcia also “pretended to speak less English than he was capable of” and said the vehicle was owned by his construction boss. Abrego Garcia was let off with a warning for driving with an expired license.
“The facts speak for themselves, and they reek of human trafficking,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement last week about Abrego Garcia. “The media’s sympathetic narrative about this criminal illegal gang member has completely fallen apart. We hear far too much about the gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
During a stop in India on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance told reporters that he disagrees with “the idea [Abrego Garcia] hasn’t been offered due process.”
Vance continued: “He had a couple of immigration hearings; he had a valid deportation order,” he said. “This idea that somehow that we couldn’t deport an MS-13 gang member – and he was an MS-13 gang member – is preposterous.
“I think there’s actually a deeper issue going on, which is that you see some radical judges at the District Court level who are trying to layer so much ‘process’ on top of the immigration system that it makes it impossible to function,” Vance said. “We have over 20 million illegal aliens in the United States of America – are we not allowed to deport them? Because if we’re not allowed to deport them, then what these District Courts are saying is fundamentally, they reject the will of the American people as it was expressed in November of 2024.”
