Donald Trump’s administration has spent several months trying to criminally prosecute Kilmar Abrego Garcia after being forced to bring the wrongly deported Salvadoran immigrant back to the U.S. last year.
But the government has, at the same time, tried to deport him to at least five different countries, including four in Africa, before his criminal case has even reached a trial in a saga that has been a lightning rod in the president’s mass deportation efforts.
This week, the administration announced it has “analyzed and eliminated all other options” from the table and “settled on a final country of removal”: Liberia.
A federal judge is currently blocking Immigration and Customs Enforcement from deporting or detaining him, noting earlier this year that the government has made “one empty threat after another to remove him to countries in Africa with no real chance of success.”
Abrego Garcia’s legal team has said he’s willing to deport himself to Costa Rica, which has agreed to take him. But in a memo last month, ICE’s then acting director Todd Lyons argued that sending him to the Central American country would be “prejudicial to the United States.”
“That, in itself, is a facially legitimate and bona fide reason” to send him to Liberia instead, Department of Justice attorneys wrote in court documents on Monday.
ICE has “weighed the evidence and documentation” and “decided that it is in the best interest of the United States to proceed with removal to Liberia,” they wrote.
Government lawyers argue that the U.S. has expended significant political capital and entered “high-stakes” and “extensive negotiations” to send him there.
While ICE is rebuffing his attempts to send himself to Costa Rica, the administration earlier this month inked a deal with the country to receive up to 25 deportees.
“If Costa Rica is good enough for those 25 random people, why’s it not good for Kilmar Abrego Garcia?” his attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg told The Independent.
The 30-year-old father is “holding up” while he’s out of federal custody and home with his family while fighting several legal battles, Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
“It’s always difficult knowing how long this period is going to last,” he told The Independent. “It’s really the government that’s prolonging his stay in the U.S. at this point, ironically.”
Abrego Garcia has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years after fleeing gang violence in El Salvador and entering the U.S. illegally as a teenager. An immigration judge blocked the government from deporting him to his home country in 2019.
Last March, he was deported to a brutal Salvadoran prison where he says he endured torture and “severe” abuse for several weeks before he was transferred to a separate jail. Government officials admitted in court that his removal was due to an “error,” and several federal judges and a unanimous Supreme Court ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return.
But the government spent weeks battling court orders to bring him back while White House officials launched a barrage of public attacks against him and declared that he would never again step foot in the country.
He was then abruptly returned to the U.S. last June — only to face allegations that he illegally moved other immigrants across the country. He has pleaded not guilty.
Abrego Garcia is asking the judge in his criminal cases to throw out the charges on grounds of “vindictive and selective prosecution,” arguing that the administration unlawfully punished him as part of a smear campaign for “having the audacity to fight back.”
Tennessee District Judge Waverly Crenshaw previously found “some evidence” that the case was the product of vindictive prosecution, pointing to an apparent admission from then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that a case was brought against Abrego Garcia in an effort to get him back to the U.S., which the judge said could be considered “direct evidence of vindictiveness.”
While he fights his criminal case, ICE has tried to deport him to several other countries — including Eswatini, Ghana, Uganda and now Liberia.
Those attempts at so-called “third-country removals” are a “fantasy” while he’s still being prosecuted, according to Maryland District Judge Paula Xinis, who is presiding over his separate deportation case.
Third-country removals — or the process of deporting immigrants to countries where they have no connections or citizenship if their home countries can’t or won’t accept them — have quietly emerged as a critical tool for the Trump administration’s mass deportation strategy.
A judge overseeing a separate, long-running legal battle over those removals said Homeland Security has adopted a policy “whereby it may take people and drop them off in parts unknown.”
“It is not fine, nor is it legal,” Judge Brian Murphy wrote in February.
Liberia, according to government attorneys, is “a thriving democracy and one of the United States’s closest partners on the African continent,” with “robust protections for human rights” and “protections for refugees and vulnerable populations.”
ICE has received “credible diplomatic assurances” that Abrego Garcia “will not be tortured in Liberia,” according to the government.
But administration lawyers also accused him of trying to seek “better treatment” in Costa Rica rather than the African country they picked out for him.
Xinis is set to hear more from the government and Abrego Garcia’s attorneys on April 28.
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