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This is Executive Dysfunction, a newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back—and keeps you posted on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team. Click here to receive it in your inbox each week.
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The Trump administration has spent the past year doggedly targeting a Maryland father named Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who gained fame after the Justice Department admitted to mistakenly sending him to El Salvador’s CECOT megaprison last spring. The Supreme Court demanded the administration return Abrego Garcia to the United States, and Donald Trump complied after initial reluctance that verged on a constitutional crisis. Ever since, Trump’s government has sought to make an example of Abrego Garcia to demonstrate, both by seeking to deport him again and by cooking up a highly dubious indictment, that defying this president will result only in further recriminations. Abrego Garcia’s story, which has become emblematic of the unleashed retribution of the president’s second term, finally took a happy turn last week, after the judge in that prosecution acknowledged what was obvious for all to see: Abrego Garcia had been targeted not based on any crime, but for having stood up to the president and having sought to push back against Trump’s horrifying deportation program.
After analyzing the DOJ’s bad-faith efforts over the course of the past 12 months, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw called out the government’s motive in no uncertain terms. In a rare move, Crenshaw dismissed the criminal indictment after declaring the prosecution against Abrego Garcia a blatantly tainted investigation “with a vindictive motive.”
Successfully proving selective prosecution is notoriously difficult—judges rarely grant it. So when it came to Abrego Garcia’s case, Crenshaw, an Obama appointee, spared no detail, meticulously going through the timeline of events that had led to the indictment, starting with a 2022 traffic stop at the heart of the case, when Abrego Garcia was questioned by Tennessee police for suspected human smuggling. The incident was referred to the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, but ultimately the agencies had declined to prosecute. However, in 2025, the DOJ was suddenly interested in this traffic stop at the very same time it was embroiled in a nasty legal battle over returning Abrego Garcia to the U.S.; this followed his filing of a civil lawsuit challenging his deportation to CECOT, which had happened despite a court order demanding he be allowed to stay in the country.
Abrego Garcia’s story became a political flash point, with U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen traveling to El Salvador to visit the Maryland resident and press for his release. Just this month, FBI Director Kash Patel, in an attempt to defend himself against charges of alcohol abuse, attacked Van Hollen for that visit, telling the senator, “The only person that was slinging margaritas in El Salvador on the taxpayer dollar with a convicted gangbanging rapist was you.”
Crenshaw thoroughly debunked the administration’s ongoing narrative about Abrego Garcia. “The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution,” . Crenshaw explained that nothing had prevented the government from looking into Abrego Garcia’s 2022 traffic stop if it had legitimate concerns about criminal activity; instead, he noted, the incident was used as a legal weapon to fight against Abrego Garcia’s lawsuit and keep him out of the U.S. This targeting went all the way to the top of the DOJ. Crenshaw revealed that a deputy for acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had been in close contact with the Homeland Security Investigations agent leading the indictment against Abrego Garcia; the two communicated at numerous points in the lead-up to the indictment with investigation updates. Ultimately, Crenshaw lay the blame with Blanche, who, instead of earnestly investigating the 2022 traffic stop, “started the investigation to implicate Abrego. He did so to justify the Executive Branch’s decision to remove him to El Salvador.”
Crenshaw went on to mention Blanche’s name nearly 30 times in his 32-page opinion, citing public statements in which Blanche outright admits that the executive branch began “investigating” Abrego Garcia after the judge overseeing his civil lawsuit “questioned” the executive branch’s decision to deport him. This all led to Crenshaw deciding to dismiss the indictment against Abrego Garcia, finding that the reopening of his 2022 traffic stop, tied with Blanche’s public statements, “taints the investigation with a vindictive motive.”
Now, Crenshaw found enough evidence only to declare that the DOJ had acted with “presumptive vindictiveness,” not “actual vindictiveness,” the latter of which is a rarely met standard that typically requires a prosecutor to admit that charges were brought specifically in retaliation against a person.
“I was not surprised,” Kristy Parker, a former federal prosecutor at the DOJ and now special counsel at Protect Democracy, told me of Crenshaw’s opinion. Based on the evidence and arguments the federal government put forward in this case, Parker believes that he made the right call. “I think the judge identified what lots of people could see from Day 1, and put the government on notice that Hey, what I’m seeing here looks sketchy and vindictive, so you’re going to have to come in here and show me how that’s not so,” Parker said. “Obviously, he concluded that they had not met that burden.”
Abrego Garcia’s case is perhaps one of the most emblematic of the administration’s vindictive nature. For Trump, refusing to accept defeat and hell-bent on punishing anyone who stands up to the president’s mass-deportation machine, this case was seen as critical in upholding his agenda, even though it started offas a mistake, nearly costing Abrego Garcia his life as he was thrust into a foreign prison, where he experienced “severe beatings,” sleep deprivation, malnutrition, and other forms of torture. The administration’s stubbornness in this instance eventually pushed the question of Abrego Garcia’s deportation to the Supreme Court, when the justices upheld an order that required the government to facilitate his return to the U.S.
Since the charges against Abrego Garcia, there have been indictments brought against James Comey and Letitia James, while Democrat-aligned lawyers and law firms, universities perceived to be insufficiently obedient, and even sitting members of Congress who have tried to challenge the administration’s policies have faced various legal and financial attacks. Talk-show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert have also been targeted. The judiciary has been one of the few levers still capable of stopping this White House, and last week Crenshaw stepped up to the plate. His decision to end the sham indictment against Abrego Garcia is a massive win for not just one man but so many across the country and ideological spectrum who have faced the wrath of a president who has decided he does not like you.
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“I think it is vindicating for everyone who still believes that the system of due process that was established in this country at the founding of our Constitution still means something,” Parker said, “and that when people invoke it and demand that it be observed, they still have power to push back against this authoritarian bullying.”
The dismissal of the criminal indictment is undoubtedly a huge win for Abrego Garcia, but he faces an uphill legal battle as the federal government continues to pursue an active removal order against him. DHS has been pushing to deport him to various African countries, despite his willingness to self-deport to Costa Rica, where he was promised a form of legal status. A different federal judge has issued a block on Abrego Garcia’s removal, and it remains in place pending the outcome of that litigation.
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Elsewhere in Jurisprudence
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In this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by J.P. Cooney, a former top attorney for special counsel Jack Smith, and Andrea Bernstein, an award-winning investigative journalist, author, and professor, to discuss Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund. The establishment of the fund itself is stunning for many reasons, but particularly because it is a blatant effort to protect the president’s family while simultaneously rewarding MAGA loyalists who have committed crimes. Both Cooney and Bernstein agree that the fund will incentivize future violence, chill legitimate dissent, and systematically erase the historical record of Jan. 6.
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In the Amicus bonus episode, Dahlia sits down with Mark Joseph Stern to review the shocking turn of events in Chicago, when a judge dismissed all of the charges against the Broadview Six, a group of protesters accused of obstructing a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Federal prosecutors in the case tried to conceal damning grand jury transcripts that ultimately led a judge to declare: “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.” Though the Broadview Six get to walk away free, Mark explains that the Trump administration has still accomplished much of what it wanted in terms of intimidating protesters “through the lies and deceit and misconduct.”
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Friend of Slate Chika Okafor, an assistant professor of law and an economist at Northwestern University, wrote about the problem with the Supreme Court’s dystopian argument in Louisiana v. Callais. “Race and politics are deeply intertwined in America—often inseparable,” Okafor argues. “Yet the court demands that future plaintiffs in voting rights cases meet an often impossible standard—namely, disentangling race from politics.” Ultimately, a test that demands what is often impossible is not a test designed to determine what is true.
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Mark and Alexis Romero team up to discuss an Alabama federal court decision that ruled that the state had illegally discriminated against Black voters when drawing its new congressional maps. In Alabama, home to one of the largest Black populations of any state, the Legislature has been persistently trying to suppress Black voters since the 2020 census, and courts have repeatedly found that lawmakers have violated the Voting Rights Act. Yet even after Callais, and after SCOTUS threw out the Alabama lower judges’ previous opinion finding unconstitutional intentional discrimination with the state’s new congressional maps, the district court handed down another loss to state lawmakers. “This warning seems aimed squarely at the Supreme Court: If the justices let Alabama get away with this, they won’t merely dilute Black representation; they’ll diminish the court’s own power too,” Mark and Alexis write.
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Friend of Slate Aziz Huq, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, analyzes the agreement between Trump and the IRS over the settlement of his lawsuit. Blanche promised to “forever” prevent any part of the federal government from investigating the Trump family or their corporate entities. Huq argues that such a promise is not only legally untenable but a “terrible mistake” as a matter of ordinary civil law. “Just imagine how it might be used—by either a Republican or a Democratic administration.”
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