Waverly Crenshaw Federal

U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw threw out the federal human-smuggling case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia without ever deciding whether the smuggling happened — dismissing it not on the merits, but on a finding that the government had pursued the charges vindictively, and ending a prosecution that grew out of a 2022 traffic stop in which Garcia was pulled over driving a vehicle carrying eight other men.

In late November 2022, troopers with the Tennessee Highway Patrol pulled Garcia over for speeding on Interstate 40 near Cookeville, Tennessee, in a vehicle carrying eight other men. (The Highway Patrol's report dates the stop to November 30; a later Department of Homeland Security account put it at December 1.) Garcia told the officers the group had been doing construction work in Missouri.

The suspicion that this was a paid smuggling run was not a characterization invented years later — the troopers voiced it at the scene, on their own body cameras. The footage, recorded that November 2022 night and publicly released in May 2025, captures the officers discussing among themselves that Garcia was driving eight passengers with no luggage and carrying about $1,400 in an envelope, with one trooper saying, "He's hauling these people for money is what he's doing … he's getting paid to haul these people probably to Maryland." Even so, they issued only a warning and let him drive on — he was not charged or arrested that day, and the stop ended after roughly an hour.

Eventually, the Justice Department indicted Garcia on charges of human smuggling and conspiracy, alleging that he had been paid to transport people who were in the country illegally, and further alleging ties to the MS-13 gang — a characterization that fact-checkers and other federal judges have said the evidence does not support.

But before the case could reach a jury, Judge Crenshaw granted Garcia's motion to dismiss the indictment, ruling that the prosecution was vindictive — brought, in the court's words, because "absent Ábrego's successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the government would not have brought this prosecution." The ruling resolved the case on that procedural ground rather than on whether the alleged smuggling occurred. The Justice Department has appealed the dismissal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, where it remained pending in 2026.