The Dec. 12, 2025, Fox News segment and Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino”s appearance at the center of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s sanctions demand (Fox News).
The Department of Justice rejected Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s sanctions demand by telling the wrongfully deported Salvadoran man, later accused of human smuggling, to take a look in the mirror before complaining about extrajudicial statements.
In a Monday filing in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, the government backed Chief Border Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino following remarks he made roughly two weeks ago on Fox News and Newsmax, comments that did not name Abrego Garcia but which were, based on context, clearly about him — hence the criminal defendant’s motion for sanctions.
On Dec. 11, the Maryland federal judge in Abrego Garcia’s civil case ordered his release from ICE custody, slamming the Trump administration for holding him “without lawful authority,” “affirmatively” misleading the court on Costa Rica’s willingness to accept him as a refugee, and finding that an order for his removal from the U.S. did not exist.
The next morning in Baltimore, Abrego Garcia, flanked by an activist offering a real-time translation, spoke out in Spanish against “this injustice.”
According to the translator and the DOJ’s account of what was said, Abrego Garcia added he “will continue to fight and stand firm against all of the injustices this government has done upon me” and that he believed “this injustice will come to an end.”
At the same rally, DOJ emphasized, Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., stated while next to Abrego Garcia that the “shameful” Trump administration “kidnapped” him and then brought “fake charges down in Tennessee” that could go “the same direction” as the charges against James Comey and Letitia James.
Later that same day, Bovino separately joined Fox News’ Jesse Watters to react, as the network’s chyrons read “Kilmar’s Home for the Holidays,” “Kilmar Wants to Fight, Fight, Fight,” and “Kilmar’s Back & He Brought the Bulls Hat,” which Watters has said “means you’re MS-13.”
During the appearance, Bovino, one of the most recognizable faces if not “the face” of the Trump administration’s deportation operation on the ground, stated that it’s “too bad that we have these activist judges that legislate from the bench and put MS-13 gang members back out on the streets to harm Americans.”
“That’s what we’re doing in these American cities, are taking individuals like this, quote, Maryland Dad, out of circulation and putting them back where they need to be, and that’s in their country of record,” Bovino added, not naming Abrego Garcia but mocking the “Maryland Dad” description of him.
Two days later, Bovino made similar comments on Newsmax to host Jon Glasgow and the viewing audience:
We have an MS-13 gang member walking the streets. As you said, a wife-beater, but also, let’s not forget, he was also an alien smuggler. So here’s someone that wants immigration relief, he wants to, to leech off the United States, and thinks it’s okay to do that. And that Jon, maybe you and I have done something wrong? Wrong answer. When he becomes deportable, he is going to get deported. And he needs to be deported now. That’s what you get when you have an extremist judge, or judges, that legislate from the bench. You have MS-13 gang members ready to prey on Americans yet again. And that’s the very thing we’re trying to stop here with President Trump and Kristi Noem’s immigration efforts here in the homeland.
Garcia’s sanctions motion was filed five days later, asking U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw, Jr., a Barack Obama appointee who has found the defendant made a “prima facie showing of vindictiveness” by the government, to punish the Trump administration for Bovino’s “highly prejudicial, inflammatory, and false statements” on cable news.
The request was a callback to Crenshaw’s prior warnings to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem about a local rule that “prohibits DOJ and DHS employees from making extrajudicial statements that will ‘have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing’ Abrego’s right to a ‘fair trial.'”
Bovino is such an employee, given that Border Patrol is part of DHS, and thus sanctions are “warranted,” Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said.
The DOJ has now fired back by slamming the human smuggling defendant’s demand as a “grave,” misguided, and hypocritical endeavor aimed at “muzzling an entire agency.”
“By casting himself as the victim of injustice that he intends to ‘keep fighting’ while his advocates claim that the present Indictment are ‘false charges’ and are ‘shameful,’ the Defendant would do well to keep his own hands clean before claiming that the Government’s are somehow dirtied,” the DOJ said. “The defense now accuses the Government of violating the Court’s order regarding extrajudicial statements and the Local Rule while the Defendant and his advocates are violating them.”
The DOJ downplayed Bovino’s remarks in multiple ways, noting he “does not have editorial control of news chyrons” and that he did not name Abrego Garcia in the “all of about thirty seconds” of words he uttered on Fox News.
The same was true of the Newsmax segment, the government went on.
“Two days later, the same agent made largely similar comments, critiquing the immigration justice system, reiterated that the Defendant would be deported again if he was ordered deported and, again, did not mention the Defendant by name,” the opposition filing continued. “And, in both instances, Mr. Bovino made his remarks only after the Defendant, his lawyers in his civil case, and activists working on his behalf made unduly prejudicial statements at his rally on the steps of the ICE office in Baltimore.”
The last line gets to the heart of the DOJ’s position, which is that the local rule “does not apply to” Bovino because he is a “non-lawyer in a governmental agency that is not litigating this matter.”
But in the event the rule did apply, the government contends, Bovino was simply correcting the record for his “client” in the face of “wild assertions” made by Abrego Garcia, his lawyers and “sympathizers about this prosecution.”
If Crenshaw were to punish this activity, it would have “grave” constitutional implications, the DOJ added.
“[H]is statements fall squarely within subsection (a)(3)’s carveout for statements necessary to protect a client from substantial undue prejudice,” the filing stated. “And a holding to the contrary would raise grave First Amendment and separation-of-powers concerns by punishing Mr. Bovino for the content of his speech, creating prior constraints, and muzzling an entire agency that does not even have lawyers appearing in this case.”
