The Trump administration late Friday urged a federal judge in Maryland to allow immigration officials to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the West African country of Liberia, saying the U.S. government has cleared the final legal hurdle in the deportation process.
Abrego Garcia’s case has been at the center of the national debate over President Trump’s immigration crackdown ever since he was deported to El Salvador in March, in violation of a federal immigration judge’s order that barred his deportation to his native country. After being held in detention facilities in El Salvador for months, including a notorious mega-prison known as CECOT, Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S. in June, only to face federal criminal charges of human smuggling. He has denied those charges.
While a trial on those criminal charges has yet to commence, the Trump administration has mounted an aggressive effort to deport Abrego Garcia from the U.S. a second time, proposing to send him to several far-flung African countries, including Uganda, Eswatini and most recently, Liberia.
The Justice Department filed a motion on Friday asking U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis to scrap a ruling she issued this summer barring the government from deporting Abrego Garcia, arguing all legal avenues to contest his deportation have been exhausted.
On Oct. 28, the Justice Department said, a U.S. government asylum officer interviewed Abrego Garcia, who remains in federal immigration detention, and determined he had failed to prove he would face persecution or torture in Liberia.
Any additional due process steps for Abrego Garcia are unwarranted, the Justice Department argued.
“Petitioner’s claims are procedurally barred multiple times over and fail on the merits in any event,” the Justice Department said in its filing. “This Court should therefore dissolve its preliminary injunction and permit the government to remove Petitioner to Liberia.”
The Trump administration submitted declarations from top U.S. officials asserting that Liberia has made “sufficient and credible” assurances that Abrego Garcia will not be harmed there or sent to another nation where he would be persecuted. In a press release late last month, Liberia’s government said it had agreed to receive Abrego Garcia on “a strictly humanitarian and temporary basis,” following a U.S. request.
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, however, argued in their own court filing on Friday that the interview conducted by a U.S. asylum officer last month did not amount to sufficient due process.
“The Government insists that the unreasoned determination of a single immigration officer—who concluded that Abrego Garcia failed to establish that it is ‘more likely than not’ that he will be persecuted or tortured in Liberia— satisfies due process. It does not,” they wrote.
His lawyers also argued the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to send Abrego Garcia to Africa — instead of Costa Rica, which has agreed to offer him refugee status — is a form of retaliation. They noted the government offered to send Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica this summer but only if he pleaded guilty to the federal human smuggling charges he faces in Tennessee.
“The timeline suggests a pattern: when the Government received orders it disliked in Abrego Garcia’s civil case challenging his unlawful removal to El Salvador; it initiated a criminal prosecution in retaliation; and when it received orders it disliked in Abrego Garcia’s criminal case, it initiated third-country removal efforts in retaliation,” the attorneys said.
The lawyers asked Xinis, the federal judge in Maryland, to prohibit the Trump administration from deporting Abrego Garcia to Liberia “unless and until an immigration judge concurs” with the determination made by the asylum officer who interviewed him. They said that review should consider the possibility that their client could be returned to El Salvador after being sent to Liberia.
Abrego Garcia first came to the U.S. in 2011, when he was 16. According to court documents, he entered the country illegally. In 2019, Abrego Garcia was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after an encounter with local police outside of a Maryland Home Depot. Abrego Garcia’s attorneys said he went there looking for work.
Court documents show an immigration judge initially denied Abrego Garcia’s release on bond, partially due to information submitted by the government that it said tied him to the MS-13 gang. The judge’s bond denial, upheld by an immigration appeals board, mentioned information from an informant whom the government deemed to be credible. Abrego Garcia has denied being part of a gang.
Abrego Garcia was ultimately released from ICE custody later in 2019 after another immigration judge granted him “withholding of removal,” barring his deportation to El Salvador due to concerns he could be targeted by gangs there. However, he was also issued a deportation order based on his illegal entry into the U.S.
Earlier this year, Abrego Garcia was again arrested by ICE, before being deported to El Salvador in March, as part of a high-profile deportation effort that sent several hundred Venezuelan and Salvadoran men accused of having gang ties to the CECOT prison. The Trump administration conceded in federal court that the deportation had been a mistake due to the 2019 withholding of removal order but Abrego Garcia nevertheless remained detained in El Salvador for months.
After being returned to the U.S. in June, Abrego Garcia was held in federal criminal custody, pending the start of his trial. After a federal judge in Tennessee ordered his release from pre-trial detention later in the summer, he was able to see his U.S. citizen child and wife in Maryland over a weekend. But his freedom was short-lived. In late August, Abrego Garcia was instructed to check in to the ICE field office in Baltimore, where he was again taken into custody.