A federal judge this week canceled the trial of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration, and scheduled a hearing on whether the prosecution is being vindictive in pursuing a human smuggling case against him.
Abrego Garcia has become a centerpiece of the debate over immigration after the Trump administration deported him in March to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Facing mounting public pressure and a court order, the Trump administration brought him back to the U.S. in June, but only after issuing an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee.
Abrego Garcia has denied the allegations, and argued that prosecutors are vindictively and selectively targeting him. Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. wrote in Tuesday’s order that Abrego Garcia had provided enough evidence to hold a hearing on the topic, which Crenshaw scheduled for Jan. 28.
At that hearing, prosecutors will have to explain their reasoning for charging Abrego Garcia, Crenshaw wrote, and if they fail in that, the charges could be dismissed.
When Abrego Garcia was pulled over in 2022, there were nine passengers in the car, and the officers discussed among themselves their suspicions of smuggling. But Abrego Garcia was eventually allowed to continue driving with only a warning.
A Department of Homeland Security agent previously testified that he did not begin investigating the traffic stop until after the U.S. Supreme Court said in April that the Trump administration had to work to bring Abrego Garcia from El Salvador, where he was deported.
Years earlier, Abrego Garcia had been granted protection from deportation to his home country after a judge found he faced danger there from a gang that targeted his family. That order allowed Abrego Garcia, who has an American wife and child, to live and work in the U.S. under Immigration and Customs Enforcement supervision.
The Trump administration has accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of the MS-13 gang. He has denied the accusations and has no criminal record.
Abrego Garcia’s defense attorney and the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia delivers remarks during a rally before his check in at the ICE Baltimore Field Office in Baltimore Maryland, on August 25. On Monday, a federal judge allowed the Salvadoran native to remain free through Christmas, after he was released earlier this month, as he awaits trial on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. File Photo by Shawn Thew/EPA
Dec. 22 (UPI) — A federal judge on Monday allowed Kilmar Abrego Garcia to remain free through Christmas as she barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement from re-detaining the Salvadoran native.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland extended a temporary restraining order to keep federal officials from deporting Abrego Garcia, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled he was deported and imprisoned in March without legal authority to El Salvador.
“This is an extremely irregular and extraordinary situation,” Xinnis told attorneys Monday, as she pressed the government on whether it would detain Abrego Garcia if there were no restraining order.
“Show your work, that’s all,” Xinis said. “Give it to me and we don’t have to speculate.”
Abrego Garcia was released from ICE detention on Dec. 11, following efforts to deport him to an African nation where he has no connection.
“Because Abrego Garcia has been held in ICE detention to effectuate third-country removal absent a lawful removal order, his requested relief is proper,” according to Xinis.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security called Xinis’ rulings “naked judicial activism by an Obama-appointed judge.”
Abrego Garcia, who illegally entered the United States nearly 15 years ago, has accused the White House of vindictive prosecution. The administration has called him an MS-13 gang member, which he denies.
Abrego Garcia had been living in Maryland with his wife and children before being deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison in March. He was returned to the United States in June and is awaiting trial on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty.
On Monday, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys said he is prepared to go to Costa Rica, which the judge said the government refuses to consider.
The “persistent refusal to acknowledge Costa Rica as a viable removal option, their threats to send Abrego to African countries that never agreed to take him and their misrepresentation to the court that Liberia is now the only country available to Abrego, all reflect that whatever purpose was behind his detention, it was not for the ‘basic purpose’ of timely third-country removal,” Xinis wrote.
What do fallen empires leave behind? Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s new work of fiction attempts to answer that question. “Three Stories of Forgetting” probes the inner worlds of three men scarred by their participation in Portugal’s history of rapacious colonialist intervention that ended in 1999. For nearly 600 years, the European republic was involved in a bloody land grab that at its peak controlled over 5.5 million square miles across Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Pereira de Almeida’s protagonists — Celestino, a slave trader; Boa Morte, a former soldier who had been conscripted to fight his fellow Africans in the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence; and Bruma, an elderly plantation worker — live in a liminal state between past and present, searching for some measure of solace in a world that offers none. I chatted with Pereira de Almeida, who was born in Angola but was reared in Lisbon, about her haunting triptych of stories.
You’re reading Book Club
An exclusive look at what we’re reading, book club events and our latest author interviews.
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida is author of “Three Stories of Forgetting,” a new novel exploring the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and the Portuguese Empire.
(Humberto Brito)
Three stories of forgetting … but nothing is forgotten among these men.
All three men are tormented by what they can’t forget, although they don’t feel exactly guilty, in the case of Celestino and Boa Morte. Bruma is a different story. The “forgetting” of the title relates to the omission of the figures who do not appear in the book, or who appear only occasionally, episodically. Those who are forgotten are the victims and their story. These three stories are also chapters of a more general story of violence, that of colonialism, whose victims are largely forgotten to this day.
Boa Morte, a valet in Lisbon, carries an enormous burden of guilt; in order to expiate it, he tries to save a young street vagrant. Of course, all attempts at redemption in the book are futile — why is that?
I don’t think redemption is as common as much of today’s fiction seems to suggest. The experience of guilt or of an existence haunted by ghosts seems more common to me. Boa Morte was forgotten by Portugal, the country for which he gave his life, and his hateful behavior left him utterly alone. What would redeem his life? Boa Morte is inspired by a man I knew who became my friend and lived on the streets of Lisbon, just like the character. One day, he was found dead in an alley. Not all lives know redemption.
The three protagonists are captives of their pasts, because the past is still present. Can you speak to that?
After reading [British philosopher] Peter Geach’s sentence that opens his book “The Virtues,” I became interested in inquiring into the lives of people who may be, so to speak, “dead in the eyes of God.” The problem with this possibility, however, is that we may die in the eyes of God early in life, without knowing it, and yet live to old age and remain here.
This sentence is important to me, regardless of its religious meaning. It is important in that it opens up the possibility that we may have exhausted our share of grace in life and, as humans, need to keep going.
All three of these characters are looking for some kind of solace — whether it’s reverting to some kind of quiet life among living things that don’t talk back, or building a lean-to as a kind of sanctuary.
Perhaps these places they seek are, in very different ways, the only possible remnants of rest: and also places where questions have ceased. Among living things that don’t talk there are no witnesses, there is no guilt.
You can’t write stories like these without some degree of empathy — do you feel sorry for these men? What do you feel for them as a writer?
I agree with that. I don’t feel sorry for them, but I tried to get closer to them and understand them, without imposing my ideas and opinions on them, something I don’t like to do when I write novels. Instead, I preferred, as I usually prefer, to fly around them like an insect, to study them, to let them talk to me: It is a non-imposing approach, which lets the characters speak. In general, I tend to be interested in characters I don’t like and who wouldn’t treat me with the kindness I show them. It’s my way of seeking justice, in its contradictions, and of exploring ambiguity in human behavior: I want to create hospitality, and that means being able to extend my hospitality to characters whose deeds I condemn.
(This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Carolyn Kellogg, Bethanne Patrick and Mark Athitakis select the best books of the year for The Times.
(Photo illustration by Josep Prat Sorolla / For The Times; book jackets from Scribner, Riverhead and Penguin Press)
Jim Ruland talked to Thurston Moore about his new book that chronicles the Sonic Youth guitarist’s love of free jazz. “I go out with my band and I play typical band gigs,” says Moore, “but I prefer being in a basement with a free jazz drummer any day of the week.”
Mark Athitakis finds favor with W. David Marx’s “Blank Space,” a sharp critique that maps the decline of our present culture, as well as Adam Morgan’s biography of 20th century literary firebrand Margaret C. Anderson, a trailblazer who bucked the prevailing culture to champion challenging art, including Joyce’s “Ulysses.” “If we want more works like ‘Ulysses’ in our world (and far less cringe) … it will demand a stubbornness from creators and dedication from consumers that the current moment is designed to strip from us,” Athatakis writes.
Apollo, one of two bookstore cats, sleeping in a box at the Iliad bookstore in North Hollywood.
(Gerard Burkhart / For The Times)
The San Fernando Valley has lost many of its beloved bookshops over the last two decades, but North Hollywood’s Iliad bookshop remains. The store, which first opened its doors 28 years ago and remains the greatest purveyor of used books in all of Los Angeles, is the kind of tangled labyrinth teeming with titles that one can get lost in for hours. I spoke with Dan Weinstein about what is moving out of the doors this holiday season.
What is selling in the Christmas rush this year?
We tend to sell the same kinds of titles all year round, so it’s standard literature, science fiction and the handful of authors we can’t keep on the shelves: Octavia Butler, Charles Bukowski, Sarah J. Maas and Brandon Sanderson. Also, a lot of gift cards! Actually, January is our strongest month for sales — winter kicks in and people like to stay at home and read.
Full disclosure: I’ve been a loyal Iliad customer since the ’90s. Do you tend to see the same faces across the years?
Oh, we have very serious hardcore customers that come over and over again. Some of them even come on a daily basis. Fortunately, we are always putting good new inventory out.
What about Hollywood business? You have a tremendous inventory of art and photography books. Do set designers come in to find inspiration?
We do sell a lot to the entertainment industry. That really keeps us alive. If we were doing business in a city other than Los Angeles, I don’t think we would do nearly as well.
Judge to hold hearing on whether Abrego Garcia is being vindictively prosecuted
A federal judge this week canceled the trial of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration, and scheduled a hearing on whether the prosecution is being vindictive in pursuing a human smuggling case against him.
Abrego Garcia has become a centerpiece of the debate over immigration after the Trump administration deported him in March to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Facing mounting public pressure and a court order, the Trump administration brought him back to the U.S. in June, but only after issuing an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee.
Abrego Garcia has denied the allegations, and argued that prosecutors are vindictively and selectively targeting him. Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. wrote in Tuesday’s order that Abrego Garcia had provided enough evidence to hold a hearing on the topic, which Crenshaw scheduled for Jan. 28.
At that hearing, prosecutors will have to explain their reasoning for charging Abrego Garcia, Crenshaw wrote, and if they fail in that, the charges could be dismissed.
When Abrego Garcia was pulled over in 2022, there were nine passengers in the car, and the officers discussed among themselves their suspicions of smuggling. But Abrego Garcia was eventually allowed to continue driving with only a warning.
A Department of Homeland Security agent previously testified that he did not begin investigating the traffic stop until after the U.S. Supreme Court said in April that the Trump administration had to work to bring Abrego Garcia from El Salvador, where he was deported.
Years earlier, Abrego Garcia had been granted protection from deportation to his home country after a judge found he faced danger there from a gang that targeted his family. That order allowed Abrego Garcia, who has an American wife and child, to live and work in the U.S. under Immigration and Customs Enforcement supervision.
The Trump administration has accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of the MS-13 gang. He has denied the accusations and has no criminal record.
Abrego Garcia’s defense attorney and the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Bedayn writes for the Associated Press.
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Judge allows Kilmar Abrego Garcia to remain free through Christmas
Kilmar Abrego Garcia delivers remarks during a rally before his check in at the ICE Baltimore Field Office in Baltimore Maryland, on August 25. On Monday, a federal judge allowed the Salvadoran native to remain free through Christmas, after he was released earlier this month, as he awaits trial on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. File Photo by Shawn Thew/EPA
Dec. 22 (UPI) — A federal judge on Monday allowed Kilmar Abrego Garcia to remain free through Christmas as she barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement from re-detaining the Salvadoran native.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland extended a temporary restraining order to keep federal officials from deporting Abrego Garcia, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled he was deported and imprisoned in March without legal authority to El Salvador.
“This is an extremely irregular and extraordinary situation,” Xinnis told attorneys Monday, as she pressed the government on whether it would detain Abrego Garcia if there were no restraining order.
“Show your work, that’s all,” Xinis said. “Give it to me and we don’t have to speculate.”
Abrego Garcia was released from ICE detention on Dec. 11, following efforts to deport him to an African nation where he has no connection.
“Because Abrego Garcia has been held in ICE detention to effectuate third-country removal absent a lawful removal order, his requested relief is proper,” according to Xinis.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security called Xinis’ rulings “naked judicial activism by an Obama-appointed judge.”
Abrego Garcia, who illegally entered the United States nearly 15 years ago, has accused the White House of vindictive prosecution. The administration has called him an MS-13 gang member, which he denies.
Abrego Garcia had been living in Maryland with his wife and children before being deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison in March. He was returned to the United States in June and is awaiting trial on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty.
On Monday, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys said he is prepared to go to Costa Rica, which the judge said the government refuses to consider.
The “persistent refusal to acknowledge Costa Rica as a viable removal option, their threats to send Abrego to African countries that never agreed to take him and their misrepresentation to the court that Liberia is now the only country available to Abrego, all reflect that whatever purpose was behind his detention, it was not for the ‘basic purpose’ of timely third-country removal,” Xinis wrote.
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Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida on ‘Three Stories of Forgetting’
What do fallen empires leave behind? Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s new work of fiction attempts to answer that question. “Three Stories of Forgetting” probes the inner worlds of three men scarred by their participation in Portugal’s history of rapacious colonialist intervention that ended in 1999. For nearly 600 years, the European republic was involved in a bloody land grab that at its peak controlled over 5.5 million square miles across Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Pereira de Almeida’s protagonists — Celestino, a slave trader; Boa Morte, a former soldier who had been conscripted to fight his fellow Africans in the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence; and Bruma, an elderly plantation worker — live in a liminal state between past and present, searching for some measure of solace in a world that offers none. I chatted with Pereira de Almeida, who was born in Angola but was reared in Lisbon, about her haunting triptych of stories.
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✍️ Author Chat
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida is author of “Three Stories of Forgetting,” a new novel exploring the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and the Portuguese Empire.
(Humberto Brito)
Three stories of forgetting … but nothing is forgotten among these men.
All three men are tormented by what they can’t forget, although they don’t feel exactly guilty, in the case of Celestino and Boa Morte. Bruma is a different story. The “forgetting” of the title relates to the omission of the figures who do not appear in the book, or who appear only occasionally, episodically. Those who are forgotten are the victims and their story. These three stories are also chapters of a more general story of violence, that of colonialism, whose victims are largely forgotten to this day.
Boa Morte, a valet in Lisbon, carries an enormous burden of guilt; in order to expiate it, he tries to save a young street vagrant. Of course, all attempts at redemption in the book are futile — why is that?
I don’t think redemption is as common as much of today’s fiction seems to suggest. The experience of guilt or of an existence haunted by ghosts seems more common to me. Boa Morte was forgotten by Portugal, the country for which he gave his life, and his hateful behavior left him utterly alone. What would redeem his life? Boa Morte is inspired by a man I knew who became my friend and lived on the streets of Lisbon, just like the character. One day, he was found dead in an alley. Not all lives know redemption.
The three protagonists are captives of their pasts, because the past is still present. Can you speak to that?
After reading [British philosopher] Peter Geach’s sentence that opens his book “The Virtues,” I became interested in inquiring into the lives of people who may be, so to speak, “dead in the eyes of God.” The problem with this possibility, however, is that we may die in the eyes of God early in life, without knowing it, and yet live to old age and remain here.
This sentence is important to me, regardless of its religious meaning. It is important in that it opens up the possibility that we may have exhausted our share of grace in life and, as humans, need to keep going.
All three of these characters are looking for some kind of solace — whether it’s reverting to some kind of quiet life among living things that don’t talk back, or building a lean-to as a kind of sanctuary.
Perhaps these places they seek are, in very different ways, the only possible remnants of rest: and also places where questions have ceased. Among living things that don’t talk there are no witnesses, there is no guilt.
You can’t write stories like these without some degree of empathy — do you feel sorry for these men? What do you feel for them as a writer?
I agree with that. I don’t feel sorry for them, but I tried to get closer to them and understand them, without imposing my ideas and opinions on them, something I don’t like to do when I write novels. Instead, I preferred, as I usually prefer, to fly around them like an insect, to study them, to let them talk to me: It is a non-imposing approach, which lets the characters speak. In general, I tend to be interested in characters I don’t like and who wouldn’t treat me with the kindness I show them. It’s my way of seeking justice, in its contradictions, and of exploring ambiguity in human behavior: I want to create hospitality, and that means being able to extend my hospitality to characters whose deeds I condemn.
(This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
📰 The Week(s) in Books
Carolyn Kellogg, Bethanne Patrick and Mark Athitakis select the best books of the year for The Times.
(Photo illustration by Josep Prat Sorolla / For The Times; book jackets from Scribner, Riverhead and Penguin Press)
Jim Ruland talked to Thurston Moore about his new book that chronicles the Sonic Youth guitarist’s love of free jazz. “I go out with my band and I play typical band gigs,” says Moore, “but I prefer being in a basement with a free jazz drummer any day of the week.”
Mark Athitakis finds favor with W. David Marx’s “Blank Space,” a sharp critique that maps the decline of our present culture, as well as Adam Morgan’s biography of 20th century literary firebrand Margaret C. Anderson, a trailblazer who bucked the prevailing culture to champion challenging art, including Joyce’s “Ulysses.” “If we want more works like ‘Ulysses’ in our world (and far less cringe) … it will demand a stubbornness from creators and dedication from consumers that the current moment is designed to strip from us,” Athatakis writes.
Finally, three critics weigh in on the 15 best books of 2025, while Mariella Rudi ticks off the nine best celebrity memoirs of the year.
📖 Bookstore Faves
Apollo, one of two bookstore cats, sleeping in a box at the Iliad bookstore in North Hollywood.
(Gerard Burkhart / For The Times)
The San Fernando Valley has lost many of its beloved bookshops over the last two decades, but North Hollywood’s Iliad bookshop remains. The store, which first opened its doors 28 years ago and remains the greatest purveyor of used books in all of Los Angeles, is the kind of tangled labyrinth teeming with titles that one can get lost in for hours. I spoke with Dan Weinstein about what is moving out of the doors this holiday season.
What is selling in the Christmas rush this year?
We tend to sell the same kinds of titles all year round, so it’s standard literature, science fiction and the handful of authors we can’t keep on the shelves: Octavia Butler, Charles Bukowski, Sarah J. Maas and Brandon Sanderson. Also, a lot of gift cards! Actually, January is our strongest month for sales — winter kicks in and people like to stay at home and read.
Full disclosure: I’ve been a loyal Iliad customer since the ’90s. Do you tend to see the same faces across the years?
Oh, we have very serious hardcore customers that come over and over again. Some of them even come on a daily basis. Fortunately, we are always putting good new inventory out.
What about Hollywood business? You have a tremendous inventory of art and photography books. Do set designers come in to find inspiration?
We do sell a lot to the entertainment industry. That really keeps us alive. If we were doing business in a city other than Los Angeles, I don’t think we would do nearly as well.
The Iliad Bookshop is located in North Hollywood at 5400 Cahuenga Blvd.
(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)
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