Department of Justice attorneys told a judge in Virginia on Wednesday evening that they wanted to drop a case they brought against the alleged East Coast leader of a violent transnational gang, rather than move forward with prosecuting him.
The move came after top DOJ officials held a large press conference last month alongside Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) to draw attention to Henrry Villatoro Santos’s arrest in a Northern Virginia suburb. They alleged at the time that Santos, a Salvadoran national, was one of the top three leaders in the country of the MS-13 gang.
After the revelation of his case dismissal, Bondi said she planned to seek his deportation in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner.
“As a terrorist, he will now face the removal process,” Bondi said.
During the press conference, Bondi had said that “anything you can associate with MS-13, he was the leader over it, all of the violent crimes.”
However, the attorney general also noted that he would “not be living in our country much longer,” suggesting deportation was an alternative to prosecution.
Prosecutors initially charged Santos with a firearm violation and Bondi had warned in a television interview that more charges were coming. Prosecutors also said authorities found “indicia of MS-13 association” in his home, along with illegal weapons.
The abrupt shift to seeking Santos’s deportation instead of moving forward with seeking a conviction of gang-related charges raised eyebrows among some, including Santos’s attorney.
In an unusual move, the attorney wrote in a court motion that he objected to his client’s case dismissal and instead argued that he should be afforded due process.
The attorney cited the “breathless pronouncements and the massive publicity” about the case and pointed to the numerous lawsuits the Trump administration is facing alleging it inaccurately accused some migrants of being gang members and deported them on the grounds that they were gang members to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador.
TOP MS-13 GANG SUSPECTED ARRESTED IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA
“The danger of Mr. Villatoro Santos being unlawfully deported by ICE without due process and removed to El Salvador, where he would almost certainly be immediately detained at one of the worst prisons in the world without any right to contest his removal, is substantial, both in light of the Government’s recent actions and the very public pronouncements in this particular case,” the attorney wrote.
The judge set a hearing for April 15 to sift through the new disputes in the case.
