The man Kristi Noem testified would "never return" just has

Kilmar Abrego Garcia's return to the United States, even under indictment, is the second rupture in the Trump admin's radical end-run of due process in a week.

Kristi Noem testimony juxtaposed with Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s indictment. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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The second-highest official inside the Department of Justice greeted Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s transfer to the United States with a sarcastic social media post: “Welcome back,” linking to his criminal indictment.

A little less than a month ago, Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified to Congress that this day would never come.

“He will never return,” Noem said, just 29 days before Abrego Garcia did.

Abrego Garcia’s arrival in the United States represents the Trump administration’s second capitulation on the topic of immigration within days. On Wednesday, the administration returned a gay asylum seeker named O.C.G., who had been living in hiding in Guatemala after being wrongly expelled to the country where he feared persecution.

A federal judge in Boston had ordered O.C.G.’s return from Latin America on the same day that he demanded due process for immigrants summarily expelled to South Sudan, a ruling that the Trump administration has been fighting ever since.

By unsealing Abrego Garcia’s charges on Friday, the Trump administration changed the national conversation from a precipitous backpedaling from its radical end-run of due process to the allegations of an indictment that they initially never sought to test in court. Abrego Garcia stands accused of two charges: conspiracy to transport aliens and unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens.

In a press conference, Attorney General Pamela Bondi claimed that Abrego Garcia was a “smuggler of humans and children and women.” Prosecutors alleged that he “solicited nude photographs and videos of a minor,” but “no charges” have been filed yet on that claim. The government will now carry a burden they previously sidestepped by spiriting him out of the country: proving their allegations beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

There are already multiple reports that the Justice Department’s criminal division chief in Nashville resigned around the time of Abrego Garcia’s indictment on May 21, and the former holder of that office, Ben Schrader, posted about his resignation on LinkedIn.

In his 15 years as a federal prosecutor, Schrader wrote, “the only job description I've ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.” Schrader did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Just Security’s co-editor-in-chief Ryan Goodman already found an inconsistency in Abrego Garcia’s indictment. Prosecutors accused Abrego Garcia of lying to an officer by not revealing he was coming from Texas, but a Department of Homeland Security referral report stated that Abrego Garcia made just that disclosure, Goodman noted.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg told CNN that the Trump administration was “playing games” with the legal system.

“The government disappeared Kilmar to a foreign prison in violation of a court order. Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him. This shows that they were playing games with the court all along,” Sandoval-Moshenberg told the network. “Due process means the chance to defend yourself before you’re punished, not after. This is an abuse of power, not justice.”

Now, instead of a secretive terrorism prison in El Salvador, Abrego Garcia’s legal proceedings will play out in public dockets and courtrooms in the United States. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who served as Trump’s lead criminal defense attorney in New York, was taunting Abrego Garcia with his welcome, but the return was a crack in the administration’s attempted exceptions to the requirement of due process of law.