GOP Chairman Demands ‘Unredacted’ Video, Docs From Garcia Traffic Stop
House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) is turning up the heat on state and federal authorities, demanding the unredacted release of all records and footage related to a 2022 Tennessee traffic stop involving suspected MS-13 operative Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a man tied to human smuggling and previously deported under President Donald Trump’s administration.
In a letter obtained Friday, Green called on Tennessee officials to deliver “full” and “unredacted” documentation from the controversial stop, which has since become a focal point in the growing criticism of the Biden-Harris administration’s lax border enforcement policies.
Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran national and suspected MS-13 member, was pulled over by the Tennessee Highway Patrol for speeding. However, troopers quickly grew suspicious after finding eight additional individuals crammed into the vehicle with no luggage — despite traveling from Texas for three days.
Fox News acquired body camera footage from the incident, in which a state trooper flatly states that Abrego Garcia “was hauling these people for money.” The Salvadoran national was initially suspected of trafficking illegal migrants. Yet, despite these red flags, he was shockingly released with only a citation for driving on an expired license.
According to a Fox News source, a now-deleted portion of the footage allegedly reveals troopers discussing the need to alert immigration enforcement. However, federal agents never arrived. Even more disturbingly, the source claims the FBI itself instructed Tennessee officers to release Abrego Garcia immediately, despite the ongoing suspicion of human trafficking.
“This is exactly the kind of reckless, open-borders policy that endangers our communities and undermines the rule of law,” Green said in a statement shared with The New York Post. “We will get to the bottom of why Abrego Garcia was released by the Biden-Harris administration despite the Tennessee Highway Patrol’s suspicions of human trafficking.”
Abrego Garcia’s name isn’t new to federal authorities. He unlawfully entered the U.S. back in 2011 and was later deported to a prison in El Salvador during President Trump’s first term as part of a broader crackdown on violent gang networks.
During the 2022 stop, Abrego Garcia told troopers he was en route to Temple Hills, Maryland, to “bring in people to perform construction work.” He later claimed he was driving his boss’s vehicle — a man identified as Jose Ramon Hernandez-Reyes, a convicted criminal who, according to ABC News, was found guilty in 2020 of transporting illegal aliens.
Federal agents recently interviewed Hernandez-Reyes, 38, at the Federal Correctional Institution in Talladega, Alabama. According to the investigation, Hernandez-Reyes admitted that he ran a smuggling operation out of Baltimore and had used Abrego Garcia “on multiple occasions” to transport illegal aliens from Texas to various U.S. locations.
Despite this mountain of evidence — and the Tennessee Highway Patrol’s own concerns — the Biden administration allowed a known repeat offender with ties to human trafficking to walk free.
Chairman Green’s pursuit of transparency aims to expose what many conservatives view as a systemic failure rooted in politically motivated negligence. By seeking unfiltered access to the footage and all law enforcement records, Green hopes to hold accountable those who enabled a potential human trafficker to slip through the cracks.
The Department of Justice has since launched an inquiry into the 2022 incident. But with federal credibility on the line, the American people deserve answers — not more bureaucratic obfuscation.
While President Trump continues to advocate for a secure border and law-and-order immigration policies, this case underscores the contrast with the Biden-Harris administration’s pattern of releasing dangerous individuals back onto American streets.
If it weren’t for investigative reporting by Fox News and a handful of Republican leaders willing to demand accountability, this story might have disappeared — just like the footage reportedly deleted from the troopers' body cams.