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Lawyers for Salvadorian migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia subpoenaed Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to testify over the government’s decision to investigate and pursue a criminal case against him this year while he was detained in El Salvador. The move portends what is certain to be a high-stakes court clash in Nashville next month, as Abrego Garcia seeks dismissal of his criminal case on the grounds of vindictive and selective prosecution.
Blanche is one of at least five government officials Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have subpoenaed to appear in the two-day evidentiary hearing, according to a court filing submitted Wednesday.
Others include two of Blanche’s deputies and two officials from the Department of Homeland Security.
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DOJ lawyers said that they plan to ask the judge to quash the subpoenas to prevent the officials from testifying.
U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw ruled earlier this month that Abrego Garcia’s legal team had established a “realistic likelihood” of vindictiveness in his criminal case, which was initiated by the Justice Department while he was detained in El Salvador. Crenshaw ordered new discovery and a two-day evidentiary hearing, scheduled for the first week in November.
Crenshaw’s ruling named Blanche directly on several occasions, which could present a bigger hurdle for the Trump administration in their efforts to quash the subpoena.
The judge cited Blanche’s remarks directly, including from an interview in June, in which the deputy attorney general said that Abrego Garcia was brought back to the U.S. not because of orders from a federal judge in Maryland, but because of the Tennessee arrest warrant. “This could be direct evidence of vindictiveness,” Crenshaw said in his ruling.
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It is notoriously difficult to have a case dismissed on the grounds of selective or vindictive prosecution, and few attempts have even made it even to the discovery phase.
Still, the outcome is anything but clear. Existing precedent requires a defendant to prove both that prosecutors acted with genuine animus in bringing the case, and that prosecutors singled them out because of that animus.
Selective prosecution requires the defense to prove that “similarly situated” persons have not been prosecuted.
Still, the case has been at the center of an eight-month legal maelstrom — one that critics say has given the Trump administration a chance to test its approach to immigration enforcement and to delay or sidestep compliance with federal court orders.
Trump officials, for their part, have railed against the “activist” judges whom they argue are blocking their agenda and impinging on the president’s executive branch authorities.
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A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment on the subpoenas, citing the judge’s earlier order for both parties to limit their public remarks about Abrego Garcia’s case.
“We cannot comment due to a gag order in this case,” the spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador in March in violation of a 2019 court order, and in what Trump administration officials later acknowledged was an “administrative error.”
He entered the country illegally more than a decade ago and had been living in Maryland with his wife and child when authorities deported him to a maximum security prison in El Salvador in March.
Trump officials have repeatedly alleged that Abrego Garcia is a vicious MS-13 gang member, a notion that Crenshaw dismissed as “fanciful” in ordering Abrego Garcia’s release from criminal custody pending trial.
Others have also objected to the administration’s characterization of the smuggling charges brought against him, noting that in 2024, they carried an average prison sentence of 15 months.
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