The DOJ Is Asking a Conservative Court to Give Trump a Terrifying New Power

Attorney General Todd Blanche may have stepped into his new official role barely two weeks ago, but his Justice Department has wasted no time continuing the vindictive prosecutions. This week saw a surprise target, though: Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The Maryland man deported last year by mistake already had his federal indictment on human smuggling charges dismissed over vindictive prosecution, but now, the Justice Department is demanding the indictment be brought back . It requested the 6 th Circuit Court of Appeals review a Tennessee judge’s decision to dismiss Abrego Garcia’s case, a prosecution that seemed completely lost. However, Abrego Garcia’s case is markedly different from other recent DOJ appeals, because upon closer inspection of the court filing, federal prosecutors don’t just want to indict the man, they want to fundamentally change how judges are allowed to apply vindictive prosecution in any case . If successful, this would drastically enable the Trump administration’s legal strategy of targeting political adversaries, with similar threats from future administrations to come.

The DOJ’s appeal was filed on Monday and it picks apart U.S. District Court Judge Waverly Crenshaw’s May decision to dismiss an indictment against Abrego Garcia after he found it was a blatantly tainted investigation “ with a vindictive motive .” Federal prosecutors dispute everything from how Crenshaw interpreted the acting U.S. attorney’s decision to indict to communications with the attorney general’s office and televised comments Blanche himself made about this case. The most remarkable part of the court filing was how the DOJ argues “presumptive vindictiveness” should not be a classification judges anywhere, for any case, should be allowed to make. Prosecutors conclude that Crenshaw’s ruling “marks a dramatic expansion of the power of courts to dismiss serious criminal charges based on subjective assessments of a prosecutor’s motivations and is an unwarranted intrusion into the Executive’s powers and responsibility to protect the public.”

Abrego Garcia was the poster boy for President Donald Trump’s most aggressive and abusive portions of his immigration agenda, as he was one of about 200 immigrants deported to El Salvador last year in violation of a judge’s order . And during the litigation to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., a federal prosecutor admitted he was deported due to an “administrative error.” His case ended up at the Supreme Court, where the justices ordered the federal government to “ facilitate” his return to the U.S. , one of the rare occasions the justices actually set a limit to Trump’s deportation powers. While it appeared as though the administration might try to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling and spark a true constitutional crisis, the DOJ eventually yielded.

On June 6, 2025, after having spent about three torturous months in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center—known as CECOT—Abrego Garcia was brought back home. He was immediately detained in Tennessee, though. That’s because acting U.S.