CNN’s legal analyst Elie Honig tore into the Trump administration’s newest attempt to justify its deportation of the Maryland man who was mistakenly sent to El Salvador under the president’s hardline immigration agenda.
The Department of Homeland Security on Friday released a 2022 traffic stop report, the agency claimed contained “bombshell” proof that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a suspected human trafficker.
But Honig, a former federal prosecutor, quickly doused that notion with cold water.
“This is not the smoking gun that they're trying to sell it as,” Honig said Friday. “I’m not seeing nearly enough information, evidence here, to conclude that this individual was a human trafficker, in the sense that that term is ordinarily used.”
Honig went on to question whether the officers who conducted the 2022 traffic stop followed proper procedures since by that time, “virtually every police officer had been trained up on human trafficking."
“What they should have done – it appears the police did do some of this – figure out who was in the car. Are there any minors? What are the relationships between the people? Are their stories consistent or inconsistent? Where are they going to? Where are they coming from?”
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The most important point, Honig noted Friday to CNN’s Jake Tapper on his show, “The Lead,” was that “the police let them go.”
“So either the police concluded there was not enough indicators of human trafficking, or they didn't do their job properly,” the legal analyst said. “But either way, Jake, it is a huge leap to go from the facts we have to ‘this man as a human trafficker.’”
Honig concluded that the Trump administration is simply “trying to backtrack and come up with this after-the-fact justification based on some police report from Tennessee that doesn't really tell us much of anything at all.”
“Let's remember he was deported first, the administration admitted it was in error,” he said.
