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Snitch deals in Kilmar Abrego Garcia case

June 30, 2025 by Alexandra Natapoff

Last week, a federal judge refused to detain Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland resident who was wrongly deported to El Salvador and now faces criminal charges, based on what she deemed to be unreliable testimony from three different government informants. Judge Barbara Holmes described the lead cooperator as “a two-time, previously-deported felon, and acknowledged ringleader of a human smuggling operation, who has now obtained for himself an early release from federal prison and delay of a sixth deportation by providing information to the government.” Court order here. A Washington Post article — Star witness against Kilmar Abrego García was due to be deported. Now he’s being freed — describes the informant as having a long criminal history, including gun violence, in contrast with Abrego Garcia’s lack of any criminal record at all. The other two informants were family members of the main informant; in return for their testimony one is seeking release from custody (on unrelated federal criminal charges), and both are seeking deferred action on their pending deportations.

Many have commented on the counterintuitive fact that the government’s star witness has already been convicted of worse crimes than Abrego Garcia is accused of. But the informant market often flips the conventional rules of crime and punishment: letting the government use the proverbial “big fish” as an informant to catch smaller, less culpable fish. The practice is prevalent in, although not limited to, drug enforcement. This New York narcotics unit, for example, helped their informant drug dealers stay in business in exchange for turning in their low-level client drug users. An ACLU report described the same dynamic in New Jersey, under which “more culpable leaders of drug networks — the ‘kingpins’ — may get less severe punishment than underlings who play a lesser role in the drug trafficking operation.”

Perhaps the highest profile critique of this practice issued in 1966 from none other than U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, himself a former prosecutor. In its efforts to prosecute Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa for a misdemeanor, the FBI dug up an incarcerated informant who was facing charges on manslaughter, kidnapping, embezzlement, assault and perjury. The informant was freed and all charges eventually dropped in exchange for his help prosecuting Hoffa. The Supreme Court validated the deal in the case Hoffa v. United States, but Chief Justice Warren dissented, complaining that “the Government reache[d] into the jailhouse to employ a man who was himself facing indictments far more serious … than the one confronting the man against whom he offered to inform.” He worried that “this type of informer … evidence[s] a serious potential for undermining the integrity of the truth-finding process in the federal courts.” Chief Justice Warren lost that argument, which is why the government is legally permitted to use, reward, and even forgive serious criminal offenders when they serve as informants against less blameworthy or dangerous people.

Filed Under: Dynamics of Snitching, Immigration, Incentives & Payments, Informant Crime, International, Reliability

U.S. seeks to deport gang informant back to El Salvador

June 27, 2025 by Alexandra Natapoff

Brought to the U.S. by the FBI as a material witness in 2023, an informant against the MS-13 gang is now facing deportation back to El Salvador. Federal officials revealed his identity during the case in which he was supposed to testify, which means that he will be identified as a snitch if he is forced to return. He is currently seeking asylum, arguing that deportation would amount to a death sentence. WBUR, an NPR public radio station, reported on the story here: U.S. wants to deport FBI informant who was set to testify in gang case in Mass.

Informants are especially vulnerable in the immigration space. For another example of an El Salvadoran informant, this one a mere teenager, who was deported notwithstanding his cooperation, see this previous post: ICE marks 17-year-old informant for deportation and death.

Filed Under: Drug-related, Immigration, International, Threats to Informants

FBI informant ran enormous multinational scam while under FBI supervision

June 28, 2024 by Alexandra Natapoff

From Bloomberg News, an extensive investigation into the FBI’s risky reliance on an informant who one former FBI agent called “the Don Corleone of cybercrime.” According to the report, Gery Shalon was “charged with 33 federal counts, including hacking, securities fraud and money laundering, [and] he faced decades in a federal prison. Instead, he spent just 10 months in a New York jail.” Shalon cooperated with the FBI for over five years, working and traveling under agency supervision. But “according to police and prosecutors in Europe [] [t]hey have evidence that during his time as a US cooperator, Shalon continued to run a substantial criminal operation targeting tens of thousands of European victims.” From the story:

[T]he running of [Gery] Shalon, one of the most significant cyber cooperators in American history, now has the potential to turn into a debacle for both the FBI and New York’s Southern District, the most powerful US attorney’s office in the country.

The details of the case add fresh fuel to concerns about the way the American system of justice commodifies guilt, exchanging criminal punishment for aid with higher investigative priorities. And thousands of European victims will have questions of their own, about how a mastermind of their woes operated so freely on the US government’s watch.

Story here: “The FBI’s Star Cooperator May Have Been Running New Scams All Along.“

Filed Under: Informant Crime, International, White Collar

FBI Agent reveals illegal informant tactics in the domestic war on terror

December 3, 2022 by Alexandra Natapoff

Informants are central to and embedded in numerous larger law enforcement programs. The New York Times Magazine published this profile of FBI agent Terry Albury who, among other things, pushed back against the FBI’s coercive development of informants in pursuit of baseless counterterrorism investigations, as well as racial and religious profiling. Albury was convicted in 2018 of leaking classified documents to journalists; he was sentenced to four years in prison. From the article, “I Helped Destroy People“:

“Assessments were the opening salvo to the informant-recruitment process. It was a delicate art of manipulation, persuading a person to work for the federal government against his or her own community, but with access to the person’s criminal history, or immigration status, it was much easier. There were different techniques agents were allowed to use. They could assist a person who lacked legal status to be given it, a tactic known as the “immigration-relief dangle.” Conversely, agents could also work with immigration officials to deport those people if and when they’d exhausted their usefulness as confidential sources. Fear was a prominent driver. . . . Another approach was to threaten uncooperative sources with spreading disinformation unless they agreed to cooperate. “The script was, ‘Everyone in your community already thinks you’re a source, so you might as well work with us.'” “

Filed Under: Immigration, International, Terrorism

Assessing terrorism informants 20 years after 9/11

April 16, 2021 by Alexandra Natapoff

NYTimes story covering the prosecution of an alleged terrorist who was set up by a paid government informant: The ‘Herald Square Bomber’ Who Wasn’t. Nearly 50 percent of international terrorism cases have involved informants, in a process that has drawn criticism for decades. From the article:

“In [terrorism] trials, the government presented evidence gathered by paid civilian informants who latched onto low-income, vulnerable and mentally challenged individuals, urged them toward a plot and, in several cases, even offered money and supplies to carry out bombings.”

See here for previous posts on terror-related informant policies.

Filed Under: Immigration, International, Terrorism

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