Kilmar Abrego Garcia won a rare legal victory last week when a federal judge in Tennessee dismissed his indictment on the grounds that it was an unconstitutionally vindictive prosecution. The judge found that the Trump-controlled Justice Department charged Abrego only because he filed a successful civil lawsuit securing his return from El Salvador after the administration illegally sent him there in violation of a court order.
Because vindictive prosecution motions rarely succeed, it’s no surprise that Abrego’s win already features in a new motion to dismiss another set of allegedly vindictive charges, as lawyers for the Southern Poverty Law Center argue that the civil rights group’s Alabama indictment should likewise be dropped before trial.
In their motion filed Tuesday, the SPLC’s lawyers noted that “just last week, another federal court dismissed criminal charges in part because” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Deputy Associate Attorney General Aakash Singh had “directed a vindictive prosecution.” The defense lawyers called Abrego’s dismissal the latest “shift towards the demise” of any “presumption of regularity” owed to the Trump DOJ.
Courts have long employed that presumption to assume that government officers, including lawyers, act in good faith. Yet some judges have questioned whether the DOJ deserves it in a second Trump term that has featured court order violations and other aberrations as the department caters to President Donald Trump’s demands.
One of the latest rebukes against the DOJ came when Abrego toppled his criminal charges of illegally transporting undocumented immigrants, to which he had pleaded not guilty. The DOJ said it plans to appeal the recent ruling in his favor.
The SPLC was charged in an 11-count fraud indictment that Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced to great fanfare last month.
In their motion to dismiss, the group’s lawyers called the charges “the latest manifestation of a top-down, retributive campaign in which he [Trump] directed his Justice Department to go after those individuals and groups he deemed his political enemies, including the SPLC.” The defense lawyers said the indictment is retaliation for exercising First Amendment rights to identify, report on and criticize extremist hate groups.
“The Administration has falsely accused the SPLC of being ‘anti-Christian,’ of aiding the Biden Administration’s ‘weaponization’ of the Department of Justice, of participating in political violence, and, most recently, of helping to ‘rig’ the 2020 election against President Donald Trump,” the SPLC’s motion said, adding that those examples of the government’s “animus over the past year culminated in the criminal charges against the SPLC — an indictment premised on conclusory accusations but devoid of provable facts or a proper statement of the law.”
Abrego’s case isn’t the only one cited in the SPLC’s motion. But the group’s lawyers argue that their case similarly “reveals sufficient evidence of presumed vindictiveness to justify dismissal of the indictment or, at a minimum, as the court did in that case, to order discovery” before it rules. If the judge in the SPLC case orders such discovery as the next step, then that would allow for more of an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the indictment before deciding whether to take the bold step of dismissing it as vindictive.
The Abrego decision isn’t binding precedent in the SPLC case, because it was a trial-level ruling, as opposed to a Supreme Court or appellate ruling that would bind judges nationwide or within their relevant appellate jurisdictions, respectively, and Alabama is in a different appellate circuit than Tennessee in any event. Still, the judge presiding over the SPLC case, Trump appointee Emily Marks, can cite it as persuasive authority if she agrees that Obama appointee Waverly Crenshaw correctly applied the same overarching principles that bind them both.
In their motion, the SPLC’s lawyers further cited Abrego’s case for the proposition that a “significant factor” in weighing vindictiveness is when a criminal investigation is opened and closed without producing charges and then charges come later without any new reason for them. In Abrego’s case, Crenshaw noted that the executive branch had closed its investigation into the 2022 traffic stop on which the case centered and then reopened the probe only after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his right to return to the United States.
Attempting to show why their case should lead to the same result, the SPLC’s lawyers sought to draw a similarly corrupt timeline in their dismissal motion. They noted that no charges were brought after the Biden administration had reviewed the matter but then, they wrote, “as part of President Trump’s specific targeting of civil rights groups and his and his officials’ particular focus on the SPLC, a dormant or closed investigation was revived, and the charges in this case were filed.”
They said the resulting indictment came “after the clear instigation by President Trump’s statements, his executive orders, and the actions to implement those statements and orders by then-Attorney General [Pam] Bondi and Acting Attorney General Blanche, along with Director Patel.”
The DOJ will have a chance to respond before the judge decides how to proceed.
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