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By Andrew Goudsward
ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) - A U.S. federal judge agreed on Tuesday to dismiss a gun charge against a man Attorney General Pam Bondi has called a leader of the MS-13 street gang after prosecutors said the Trump administration wanted to deport rather than prosecute him.
U.S. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick put the order on hold until Friday to allow the man, Henrry Josue Villatoro Santos, 24, to pursue other legal channels to contest what his lawyer warned could be an imminent removal to an El Salvador prison.
Fitzpatrick said the criminal case was not the proper forum to decide issues related to his deportation and noted that he had limited authority to question the decision by prosecutors to drop the charge.
“I cannot and will not go in and second guess decisions that are uniquely prosecutorial in nature,” Fitzpatrick said during a hearing in Alexandria, Virginia.
Villatoro Santos, a Salvadoran man living illegally in Virginia, was charged last month with illegal possession of a firearm after an FBI SWAT team raided his home. During a news conference, Bondi called him one of the top three leaders of MS-13 in the U.S. and touted his arrest as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrant gangs.
In a criminal complaint, an immigration agent said law enforcement “observed indicia of MS-13 association” and seized four guns and ammunition during a search of Villatoro Santos’ room, but made no reference to his alleged leadership in the gang. He was not charged with any gang-related activity.
Villatoro Santos’ case is one of several in which Trump administration officials have publicly labeled immigrant detainees gang leaders and terrorists without backing up those claims with evidence in court.
Less than two weeks after Villatoro Santos was arrested, prosecutors moved to drop the charge and Bondi said he would face removal proceedings. A federal prosecutor, John Blanchard, told the judge on Tuesday that he did not know what would happen to Villatoro Santos once the charge was dropped.
A lawyer for Villatoro Santos asked the judge to delay ruling on the motion, warning of a risk that Villatoro Santos would be sent to El Salvador without the ability to challenge his deportation. The Trump administration has sent hundreds of migrants it has branded members of MS-13 and other transnational gangs to a prison in El Salvador without a court process.
The lawyer, Muhammad Elsayed, said the Trump administration had made a “high-profile spectacle” of the case and sought assurances that Villatoro Santos would have an opportunity to defend himself in immigration court.
“This was clearly a political decision,” Elsayed said of the decision to drop the criminal case.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Frances Kerry)
