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A high-stakes immigration case involving Salvadoran migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia has prompted the ousting, suspension or resignation of several longtime Justice Department officials, clearing out potential internal resistance to the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.
Abrego Garcia’s case, in particular, has dominated headlines for months and become a flashpoint for how far the Justice Department is willing to go to enforce President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies, even at the cost of ousting career officials and raising suggestions from some federal judges that administration officials are acting in bad faith.
In Maryland, testimony from veteran prosecutor and then-acting deputy director of the Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation, Erez Reuveni, prompted DOJ to fire him after he conceded to U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis that Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador as the result of an “administrative error.”
One day after Reuveni testified, senior Justice Department officials placed him on indefinite leave, citing what they described as his failure to “zealously advocate” for the government. (His supervisor at the Justice Department, August Flentje, was also placed on leave.)
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Reuveni, who had received commendations by his supervisors at DOJ during Trump’s first term in the White House, was fired shortly after.
His assertion to the court was backed by then-acting field director for ICE’s enforcement and removal operations, Robert Cerna. Cerna told the court in a March 31 sworn declaration Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador despite the withholding of removal order granted by a judge in 2019. “Abrego Garcia, a native and citizen of El Salvador, was on the third flight [from the U.S. to El Salvador] and thus had his removal order to El Salvador executed,” Cerna said. “This removal was an error.”
It was not immediately clear whether Cerna still remains in his role at DHS, and agency officials did not immediately respond to Fox News’s request for comment.
But months later, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Nashville abruptly resigned from his role as the chief of the criminal division for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee.
Ben Schrader, a U.S. prosecutor who spent 25 years with the Department of Justice, announced his resignation as the chief of the criminal division for the U.S. Middle District of Tennessee on the same day that the Justice Department secured an indictment against Abrego Garcia on two charges in Nashville related to a 2022 traffic stop.
At the time the indictment was handed down, Abrego Garcia was still being detained in El Salvador and lawyers for the department told a federal judge in Maryland that he would “never step foot” on U.S. soil.
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The criminal charges were unsealed only after Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S. in early June.
“It has been an incredible privilege to serve as a prosecutor with the Department of Justice, where the only job description I’ve ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons,” Schrader said in a statement on LinkedIn announcing his departure.
Though Schrader declined to detail publicly what his reasons were for leaving the Justice Department, several outlets at the time, including ABC News, reported that he had left as a result of the indictment.
Taken together, the oustings point to how the Trump Justice Department is actively pushing out officials who object to the president’s policies, or fail to sufficiently defend what critics have called illegal moves in court.
As a result, judges handling Abrego Garcia’s numerous cases have voiced increased skepticism of the DOJ’s actions.
It’s unclear what, if anything, any of the former Justice Department officials might have done differently in Abrego Garcia’s case.
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It’s also unclear whether it would have been appropriate for the officials to have intervened in any capacity.
The Justice Department’s decision to fire Reuveni and place his supervisor on leave has underscored the lengths the department is willing to go to ensure its views are represented in court.
More than anything, however, the change of posture has been underscored in the many status hearings judges have ordered in certain cases, including requiring certain officials to appear in court and testify under oath.
These obligations, in addition to daily status updates and extensive discovery requirements, are perhaps the clearest signal that the relationship between the courts and Justice Department officials — one that for years enjoyed healthy levels of trust — has eroded, the result of what judges have characterized as the Justice Department’s recent posture of obfuscation, evasiveness, and even “lawless” actions in response to certain court orders.
On more than one occasion, this has prompted them to accuse the government of acting in bad faith and willfully defying the court.
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Judge Xinis, who previously described the Justice Department’s actions in the Abrego Garcia case as a “willful and bad faith refusal to comply” with court orders, upbraided an attorney for the Justice Department earlier this year for the lack of candor in the Abrego Garcia case.
“This has been the process since day one,” Xinis scolded at that status hearing. “You have taken the presumption of regularity and you’ve destroyed it, in my view.”
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