OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
6:36 PM – Friday, August 29, 2025
Attorneys for Salvadoran illegal alien Kilmar Abrego Garcia have asked a federal judge to impose a gag order on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi — seeking to prevent them from making what they described as “baseless public attacks” against their client.
In a motion filed on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers accused Trump administration officials of targeting their client since his release from prison, issuing “highly prejudicial, inflammatory and false statements.”
“To safeguard his right to a fair trial, Mr. Abrego respectfully renews his earlier requests that the Court order that all DOJ and DHS officials involved in this case, and all officials in their supervisory chain, including [Bondi and Noem], refrain from making extrajudicial comments that pose a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing this proceeding,” the attorneys stated in a 15-page motion to U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw.
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Noem and Bondi have accused Abrego Garcia, who entered the U.S. illegally, of having ties to the MS-13 gang, citing his tattoos and information from a confidential government source.
In 2019, Abrego Garcia also reported fears of persecution from Barrio 18 when he applied for asylum in the United States. However, his asylum request was denied due to a missed filing deadline, but an immigration judge still later granted him “protection from deportation.”
Since MS-13 and Barrio 18 are known gang rivals, the situation has prompted questions about the accuracy of his denial. MS-13 is the primary and most well-known rival of Barrio 18, and the rivalry is both violent and territorial — leading some gang members to flee the country when they fear for their lives.
Nonetheless, Abrego Garcia and his attorneys have maintained that there is no definitive evidence linking him to MS-13.
“He doesn’t belong here. He won’t be staying here. America is a safer nation without this MS-13 Gangbanger in it,” The Department of Homeland Security said about Abrego Garcia in a post on social media on Monday.
Abrego Garcia was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Baltimore earlier this week, just days after his release during his pending criminal human smuggling case in Tennessee. He had previously been deported in March to the Salvadoran mega-prison CECOT, only to be returned to the U.S. to face human smuggling charges stemming from a 2022 traffic stop.
After his detention by ICE, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys were told he could be deported to Uganda.
Then, on Monday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ruled that the administration is “absolutely forbidden” from removing him until a hearing can determine whether he will be allowed to contest the deportation to a developing country.
“If Kilmar Abrego Garcia did not want to be mentioned by the Secretary of Homeland Security, then he should have not entered our country illegally and committed heinous crimes,” a DHS official told the press on Friday morning.
“Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend this criminal illegal MS-13 gang member who is an alleged human trafficker [and] domestic abuser,” the DHS official continued. “The media’s sympathetic narrative about this criminal illegal alien has completely fallen apart, yet they continue to peddle his sob story.”
“We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
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