Left to right: Kilmar Abrego Garcia attends a protest rally at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Baltimore, Monday, Aug. 25, 2025, to support Abrego Garcia (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough), Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem speaks during a news conference at the Nashville International Airport, Thursday, July 17, 2025, in Nashville, Tennessee (AP Photo/George Walker IV), and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks at a press briefing with U.S. President Donald Trump in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room in the White House in Washington, DC on Friday, June 27, 2025 (Annabelle Gordon/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images).
Kilmar Abrego Garcia”s lawyers have accused the DOJ of trying to stack the evidentiary deck against the Salvadoran by seeking to introduce patently “unfair” allegations that are “likely to distract the jury” and back Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s out-of-court statements that he’s a “horrible” person.
The 14-page filing in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee on Thursday came in opposition to the DOJ’s stated intent to use evidence of alleged “pornographic messages” between Abrego Garcia and a minor — a “known informant who has been previously compensated for providing information to law enforcement,” and was said to have been 15 years old in 2020, when the messages were sent.
Beyond expressing a desire to stipulate to his use of two phone numbers, so that alleged domestic violence against his wife will not be introduced to “prove his use of those phone numbers,” Abrego Garcia’s lawyers insist that claims of “pornographic messages” between a Snapchat account with the name “soytugaa” and the witness should not be used as evidence against him.
On Nov. 13, the Trump administration filed its notice of intent and acknowledged that Witness-1, identified only as N.V., is “someone not involved in the alien smuggling conspiracy charged in the Indictment” but can nonetheless testify Abrego Garcia attempted to recruit her to “join […] during the timeframe of the conspiracy[.]”
“The witness will testify that the defendant invited her to come on the smuggling trips,” the DOJ said, before alleging that Abrego Garcia and the witness “exchanged pornographic messages and videos with each other via a messaging application” while he was 25 and she was 15.
Claiming prosecutors did “not intend to offer these messages as evidence during Witness-1’s direct testimony,” the DOJ said it could still “foresee […] multiple lines of cross examination that would open the door to these messages being admitted on re-direct examination” — in the event Abrego Garcia “attack[ed] Witness-1’s personal knowledge of the defendant[.]”
The government said that would transform what appears to be inadmissible character evidence into admissible evidence that would tend to help the DOJ prove the witness’s “close relationship” with Abrego Garcia.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have now countered that “evidence of alleged pornographic messages exchanged” with the witness should be excluded, and for multiple reasons.
For one, the DOJ hasn’t proved that Abrego Garcia was using the “soytugaa” Snapchat account at the time the messages were sent, the filing said.
Second, the defense claims the DOJ has been cagey about screenshot evidence of the November and December 2020 messages, which allegedly show “adult pornography […] involving third-party adults, not Witness-1 or the user ‘soytugaa.'”
“Even though the screenshots do not depict any sexually explicit content involving minors, the government has not provided these unblurred screenshots to the defense and has instead informed the defense that they can be reviewed in person at the United States Attorney’s Office,” the filing stated. “The government also revealed that it does not have any other records of purported communications between Witness-1 and the account ‘soytugaa.'”
“At most, the screenshots show that one of the chat participants saved what appears to be an image depicting nude bodies to the chat; it is not clear from the screenshot which of the users sent that image,” the defense claimed.
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Taken together, the defense asserted that allowing this “unfair” prejudicial evidence would do little to prove the alleged smuggling offenses or a “close relationship” with the witness. Rather, the “lurid and extraordinarily inflammatory” evidence would serve to “distract the jury” and shore up in the jury’s mind that Abrego Garcia is a “horrible individual,” as Noem once put it.
“The government seeks to use Witness-1’s testimony to prove that Mr. Abrego is a ‘child predator’ who ‘will never be loose on American streets,’ not for any permissible purpose under the Federal Rules of Evidence,” the filing concluded.
In recent days, Abrego Garcia’s legal team also accused the Trump administration of “misleading” a Maryland federal judge in his civil case about Costa Rica’s willingness to accept him upon removal from the U.S., reiterating claims that government “vindictiveness” is running rampant.
U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw, a Barack Obama appointee, two months ago ordered an evidentiary hearing, finding that the “totality of events” surrounding Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation and ensuing prosecution “creates a sufficient evidentiary basis to conclude that there is a ‘realistic likelihood of vindictiveness’ that entitles Abrego to discovery” before his motion to dismiss the criminal case is decided.
Abrego Garcia has attempted to compel Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to testify, but the DOJ has vehemently resisted.
Crenshaw separately slammed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Noem for “troubling” out-of-court statements about the defendant.
In August, Noem branded the defendant an “MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser, and child predator,” a statement that was again “contrary” to local rules guarding against extrajudicial statements, Crenshaw noted.
Initially scheduled for early November, the judge called off the evidentiary hearing and rescheduled it for Dec. 8 and 9. But on Thursday, Crenshaw canceled the hearing again — this time not setting new dates.
Conrad Hoyt contributed to this report.
