U.S. government attorneys argued on April 7 that the Trump administration still intends to deport Salvadoran citizen Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia, even as a new agreement with Costa Rica would allow some deportees to be sent elsewhere rather than returned to their home countries. The argument came during a hearing before U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland.
Xinis, who previously barred U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from deporting or detaining Abrego Garcia, set a schedule for additional briefing and scheduled another hearing for April 28. The dispute centers on where the government will send Abrego Garcia if it proceeds with deportation, and whether the government has a viable plan to carry it out.
The government’s position was presented as a continuation of earlier court fights tied to Abrego Garcia’s mistaken removal to El Salvador last year. Since his return to the United States, Abrego Garcia has been contesting a second deportation to a series of African countries proposed by Homeland Security officials, according to the record described in court.
In court on Tuesday, Ernesto Molina, director of the Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation, suggested that Abrego Garcia could “remove himself” to Costa Rica. Xinis rejected that framing, pointing to the fact that the DOJ is prosecuting Abrego Garcia in Tennessee on human smuggling charges and calling it a “fantasy” to say he can choose where to go while the criminal case is pending.
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have argued that if he is going to be deported, he should be sent to Costa Rica, which had previously agreed to accept him. But Todd Lyons, the acting head of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, said in a March memo that deporting Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica would be “prejudicial to the United States,” and argued he should be sent to Liberia instead because the government had invested political capital and resources negotiating with Liberia to accept third-country deportees.
The case has also included a series of rulings describing the limits of the agency’s deportation planning. Xinis previously wrote that the agency had no viable plan to remove Abrego Garcia to countries in Africa, referring in February to “one empty threat after another” in an effort to remove him to countries with no real chance of success.
Abrego Garcia, 30, has lived in Maryland for years and has an American wife and child. He immigrated to the United States illegally as a teenager, and in 2019 an immigration judge ruled he could not be deported to El Salvador because he faced danger there from a gang that had threatened his family. Despite that ruling, Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador by mistake last year.
Facing public pressure and a court order, the Trump administration brought Abrego Garcia back to the United States in June, after securing an indictment that charged him with human smuggling in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty and has asked the Tennessee judge to dismiss that case, even as his immigration case continues under Xinis’s supervision in Maryland.