More evidence has surfaced showing that deported Salvadoran illegal alien Kilmar Abrego Garcia is at minimum a human trafficker.
Justice Department sources told ABC News that convicted smuggler Jose Ramon Hernandez-Reyes, now in federal prison for smuggling illegals, confessed to investigators that Garcia worked for him and transported aliens from Texas to other locations.
The latest on Garcia won’t help his case. Federal authorities allege he is a member of the MS-13 terror gang. Court documents depict him as a brutal wife beater.
In a related development, the Trump administration has cited a “state secrets” exemption to avoid revealing documents about Garcia in a federal court, records show.
Transporting Illegals
Deported March 15, Garcia is the center of a court and political battle between a far-left judge and Democrats and the Trump administration. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of the district court in Maryland ordered the administration to return Garcia to the United States, a decision with which the U.S. Supreme Court imprudently agreed. It said the administration must “facilitate” his return. The administration argues that it cannot return him because he is no longer under federal jurisdiction. They also say that, in any event, he would be deported again immediately because of his gang connection. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has said Garcia will stay put.
Along the way, evidence has continued mounting that Garcia isn’t the wholesome “Maryland father and husband” his backers claim. And now, with the latest from convicted trafficker Reyes, Garcia’s far-left fangirls have another obstacle to surmount.
In 2022, as The New American reported last week, Tennessee Highway Patrol officers stopped the illegal Salvadoran for speeding and failure to maintain his lane. Eight passengers, likely illegals, were in the 2001 black Chevy Suburban he drove. He confessed that his license was suspended. The patrolmen suspected that he was paid to transport the passengers to Maryland.
Garcia confessed that his “boss” owned the SUV, and that “boss” turned out to be Reyes. When the cops contacted the Biden administration’s FBI, the bureau told them to let Garcia go.
ABC Report
Now, ABC has reported, Reyes has turned stool pigeon.
They noted that Reyes, 38, “was the registered owner” of the SUV. Citing sources, they disclosed that
Federal agents investigating the Tennessee incident appeared late last month at the Federal Correctional Institution in Talladega, Alabama, to question Hernandez-Reyes, who had an attorney present and was granted limited immunity, sources familiar with the interview said.
Hernandez-Reyes told investigators that he previously operated a “taxi service” based in Baltimore. He claimed to have met Abrego Garcia around 2015 and claimed to have hired him on multiple occasions to transport undocumented migrants from Texas to various locations in the United States, the sources told ABC News. The frequency and time frame of the alleged trips was not immediately clear.
ABC fretted that the interrogation is
a new and aggressive step in the government’s efforts to gather potentially incriminating information about Abrego Garcia’s background — even as it resists calls for him to be provided typical protections to respond to such accusations through the American legal system.
Maybe, but the interrogation comports with what Just the News revealed about the stop.
As The New American reported April 24, the website obtained documents from the Department of Homeland Security about the stop:
Abrego Garcia told the state trooper that the owner was his boss. However, that SUV was flagged separately by the Homeland Security Investigations [HSI] Baltimore field office as belonging to a target they suspected of human trafficking or smuggling, the documents show.
The website continued:
“Vehicle is used by HSI Baltimore target in human smuggling/trafficking operation. Vehicle makes trips to southern border to pick up non-citizens,” the record reads. The memo says the Baltimore HSI case agent should be notified if the vehicle is encountered.
Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, who Abrego Garcia claimed he was working for, had been previously convicted of smuggling illegal aliens into the United States.
In 2020, Hernandez Reyes, himself an illegal alien, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in prison for smuggling fellow illegal aliens in the United States after he was stopped by law enforcement in Mississippi in a car with passengers from Mexico, El Salvador and Honduras. Homeland Security records indicate Hernandez Reyes’ “deport order” was reinstated in March 2021, as his 18-month sentence was nearing its end.
Hearing on May 16
Relative to Garcia’s deportation, Judge Xinis ordered the Trump administration to prepare for a “formal briefing of the defendant’s implications of privilege, principally the state secrets and deliberative process privileges.” The Hill reported that “the government formally invoked the privilege in a sealed filing” today.
Trafficking and the court hearing aside, a pile of solid evidence links Garcia to MS-13. As well, in two petitions for protective orders from the circuit court in Prince George’s County, Maryland, his wife accused him of beating her.
Xinis set a hearing for May 16.
Despite that, after the Trump administration booted Garcia back to El Salvador where he belongs, in a GoFundMe appeal that raised almost $300,000, Garcia’s wife depicted him as a wonderful man wrongly taken from his family.
When audio of her appeal to the judge for protection was published, she explained away the petitions by saying that “neither of us were in a good place” at the time. Garcia, she claimed, “was traumatized from the time he spent in ICE detention and we were in the throes of COVID.”
Which doesn’t deny that Garcia beat her to a pulp.
