Left to right: Kilmar Abrego Garcia attends a protest rally at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Baltimore, Monday, Aug. 25, 2025 (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/AP Images).
The Trump administration should be sanctioned over extrajudicial statements that have damaged Kilmar Abrego Garcia“s right to a fair trial, a motion filed in Tennessee federal court on Friday alleges.
In the 14-page motion for sanctions, the Maryland man’s attorneys are asking U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw, Jr., a Barack Obama appointee, to first get to the bottom of the latest dispute.
Specifically, the motion asks for an order forcing the government to disclose information about “multiple highly prejudicial, inflammatory, and false statements” allegedly made by Chief Border Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino during appearances on Fox News and NewsMax.
The request comes as part of Abrego Garcia’s criminal case on human smuggling charges out of the Middle District of Tennessee.
In late August, the man whose case assumed outsized importance and became a flashpoint in the second Trump administration’s immigration agenda asked Crenshaw to issue a gag order against several officials – and especially U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem.
By late October, the court more or less ruled in the defendant’s favor; an opinion and order made clear the court would enforce 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,'” assuming a trial occurs.
Now, Abrego Garcia says the government “repeatedly violated” the court’s order and the local rule on which it is based with statements that are both “inappropriate and prejudicial.”
“The latest violation is flagrant, and sanctions and other case-related relief are warranted,” the sanctions motion reads.
The filing documents the statements in question, at length.
On Dec. 12, Bovino told Fox News host Jesse Watters:
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.
On Dec. 14, Bovino told NewsMax host Jon Glasgow:
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.
“Bovino’s statements are the archetypal problematic statements this Court has prohibited,” the motion goes on. “That’s unsurprising, because these are the talking points used by the White House and DHS.”
The defense motion argues the statements made by the Border Patrol official “go both to Mr. Abrego’s character and reputation and to his guilt or innocence in this case” and ultimately “flatly undermined these proceedings by criticizing the judges presiding over Mr. Abrego’s criminal and civil cases.”
Abrego Garcia was infamously part of a summary deportation flight to a prison notorious for torture in El Salvador, but his deportation violated multiple court orders – both specific to him and general to the flight in question.
A DOJ lawyer was sacked after admitting the Trump administration’s mistakes and, through a seesawing battle that has gone up the legal ladder all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and back down to various different district courts, Abrego Garcia was returned to the United States, promptly charged with unrelated crimes, and eventually released on bail before being taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) yet again in late August.
Once again, Abrego Garcia has accused Trump’s DOJ of compounding the administration’s apparently bad behavior.
“The government’s refusal to issue a retraction, or even to respond to counsel’s correspondence raising Mr. Bovino’s statements, evinces their utter disregard for this Court’s Order,” the sanctions motion goes on. “Although the retraction of an extrajudicial statement ‘has only a modest impact on the likelihood of prejudice inquiry, it is considerably more relevant to the issue of willfulness.'”
The motion goes on like this, at length:
Mr. Bovino’s statements, which come on the heels of a long line of vitriolic and prejudicial statements on the part of the government, are just the latest in a longstanding pattern of governmental misconduct that jeopardizes Mr. Abrego’s right to a fair trial. The jury pool continues to be exposed, within weeks of the current trial date, to highly prejudicial and false claims about Mr. Abrego. Mr. Bovino’s statements are also likely to influence witness testimony by causing witnesses to fear that presenting any testimony that does not align with the government’s theory of the case will put them at risk of retribution.
To that end, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys are asking Crenshaw to force the government to explain whether Bovino was made aware of the gag order by the DOJ, who authorized Bovino to speak about the case, and “what guidance that person or persons gave Mr. Bovino about what he could and could not say on national television, as well as any and all communications between counsel for the government and Mr. Bovino or DHS regarding Mr. Bovino’s statements, including any attempts to obtain a retraction or apology, so that the Court may determine the appropriate course of action.”
