Main: President Donald Trump gestures during a reception for Republican members of Congress in the East Room of the White House, Tuesday, July 22, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson). Inset left: Kilmar Abrego Garcia speaks in a hotel restaurant in San Salvador, El Salvador, Thursday, April 17, 2025 (Press Office Sen. Van Hollen, via AP). Inset right: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, left, speaking as President Donald Trump, far right, listens during a cabinet meeting at the White House, Tuesday, July 8, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).
Attorneys representing Kilmar Abrego Garcia are accusing the Trump administration of violating court rules by making inflammatory and prejudicial public statements about the man they “illegally renditioned to El Salvador” by mistake without due process, which they allege are likely to taint the jury pool and deprive their client of a fair trial.
After months of contentious wrangling in court and allegations of government misconduct, the administration returned Abrego Garcia from the notorious CECOT prison to the U.S., but only after indicting him on charges of unlawfully transporting migrants and conspiracy.
The seven-page motion filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee comes days after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem held a press conference in the Volunteer State during which she made several disparaging remarks about Abrego Garcia, calling him a “monster” and accusing him of multiple crimes that are not associated with the charges he is currently facing.
Noem, on Friday, said the following about Abrego Garcia:
I am grateful that this man is being brought to justice. He has a lifetime history of trafficking individuals and of taking advantage of minors, soliciting pornography from them, nude photos of them, abusing his wife, abusing other illegals, aliens that were in this country, women that were under his care while he was trafficking them. He”s a horrible human being and a monster, and he should never be released free. . . . I hope this judge does the right thing and brings this man to justice for the crimes that he has committed. The evidence is overwhelming. This judge needs to make sure that he applies the law equally to every single person that shows up in his courtroom
She went on to state that he “consistently” worked with MS-13 and helped to “facilitate the murder of a mother of one of the rival gangs.”
Noting that Noem is one of the nation’s highest ranking law enforcement officials in the country and that her press conference was held “mere miles” from the courthouse where Abrego Garcia will be tried, his attorneys argued that the statements were “precisely of the type that are most likely to prejudice Mr. Abrego’s right to a fair trial.”
“Secretary Noem assailed Mr. Abrego’s character and reputation, including with verbal insults and allegations that are irrelevant to the offenses charged in the indictment and almost certainly inadmissible at trial,” Abrego Garcia’s attorney Sean Hecker wrote. ” She also presumed that Mr. Abrego is guilty, without regard to the judicial process or the presumption of innocence, and repeated the government’s refrain that Mr. Abrego should ‘never be released free.'”
Such statements, Hecker wrote, are not only “highly likely” to taint the pool of potential jurors but also appear “calculated to maximize the prejudice” against Abrego Garcia.
Hecker requested that the court order the government to issue a retraction of Noem’s comments and to clarify the local rules prohibiting potentially prejudicial extrajudicial statements.
Previously, U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw on July 3, 2025, granted a request from Abrego Garcia, ordering both parties — including attorneys and employees of government agencies involved in the case — not to make potentially prejudicial public statements. Abrego Garcia’s attorneys subsequently made two requests for the government to disseminate the order to personnel in the supervisory chain, but had not received a response as of Monday, per the filing
“Accordingly, Mr. Abrego respectfully requests that the Court issue an order clarifying that the obligations under Local Criminal Rule 2.01 apply to DHS and other government agencies and offices with which counsel are associated,” the filing states. “In light of the July 18 press conference, Mr. Abrego also requests that this Court order the government to notify all officials at DHS that are involved in the investigation of Mr. Abrego, and all officials in their supervisory chain, of the requirement to comply with this Court’s rules regarding extrajudicial statements.”
