GREENBELT, Maryland — The Trump administration has made haphazard and, so far, ineffectual attempts to find a country willing to accept Kilmar Abrego Garcia if he’s deported again from the U.S., according to testimony and evidence presented in federal court here Friday.
A senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official testified that efforts to get the African countries of Uganda and Eswatini to accept the high-profile deportee have foundered in recent days.
Another potential destination, Ghana, also seemed to fizzle Friday as that country’s foreign minister said unequivocally on X that Ghana would not agree to receive Abrego.
Abrego is originally from El Salvador. He entered the U.S. illegally and lived in Maryland for more than a decade before he was arrested in March and deported to a notorious Salvadoran prison. Courts declared that deportation illegal because it violated a 2019 order from an immigration judge who barred the U.S. from sending him there due to potential persecution by a local gang.
The Trump administration returned Abrego to the U.S. in June under court order. Federal prosecutors simultaneously charged him with human smuggling in Tennessee — charges Abrego denies.
The administration, in the meantime, has said it wants to deport Abrego again, this time to some other country. But Abrego’s lawyers argued during Friday’s hearing that the administration is dragging its feet in those deportation efforts in order to keep Abrego in immigration jail and pressure him to plead guilty.
The meager and unsuccessful deportation efforts could lead to Abrego being released from immigration detention within days, if U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis concludes the government hasn’t shown it’s making a sincere and substantial effort to find a destination for Abrego.
Abrego told the administration in August that he would accept deportation to Costa Rica. One of his lawyers, Andrew Rossman, said Friday that the administration’s scattershot attempts to identify African countries instead show that the administration is intent on refusing the Costa Rica offer.
“We now know they are 0 for 3. Three strikes and you’re out. They have spun the globe and picked various places … to fail on purpose by selecting places that would be completely unpalatable for Mr. Abrego,” Rossman told Xinis. “What we’ve been getting in this courtroom is a lot of run-around.”
The appearance that arrangements for Abrego’s deportation were being intentionally or unintentionally fumbled by the administration was underscored by the testimony of Immigration and Customs Enforcement official John Schultz, who said lower-level personnel at his agency erred by formally notifying Abrego Thursday that the U.S. government intended to send him to Ghana.
“I understand a notice was prematurely sent to Mr. Abrego Garcia,” Schultz said. “I believe the field office was just trying to get ahead of things so that, if Ghana did say yes, removal would be quicker.”
Xinis held the daylong hearing in connection with a lawsuit Abrego filed seeking his release from immigration detention. She ordered the government to produce one or more witnesses Friday with “first-hand knowledge” about the administration’s efforts to find a country to send Abrego to.
Schultz did provide some new details about the Abrego deportation efforts. He said the State Department reported that officials in Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, “said no initially” when they were asked just this week to accept Abrego. But, he said, discussions are ongoing.
“I don’t know if there’s a rank structure on the next country if Eswatini doesn’t work,” Schultz said.
Schultz also appeared to confirm the White House’s involvement in selecting countries Abrego might be sent to. He said an official at the Homeland Security Council, Matt Ochoa, told him that Uganda was a place the administration wanted to send Abrego to, but that eventually fell through. Justice Department attorneys cut short that questioning with an executive privilege claim.
However, Schultz acknowledged he’d had no significant involvement in the Abrego matter before this week and said he was entirely unaware of discussions about sending Abrego to Costa Rica. That irritated the judge, who complained that aspects of her order were “ignored” by the government.
“You come today with a witness who knows nothing about Costa Rica — I mean, less than nothing,” said Xinis, an Obama appointee. “That seems to be in contravention of this order.”
Under a 2001 Supreme Court case, immigrants can’t typically be detained for more than six months unless their deportation is reasonably foreseeable.
Abrego’s lawyers and the government disagree about when that six-month clock started. His attorneys say it was back in 2019 when Abrego was ordered deported by an immigration judge, albeit with the caveat he could not be sent to El Salvador. The Justice Department contends the clock didn’t begin running until August.
Rossman argued that the time Abrego spent in prison in El Salvador from March to June should count as immigration detention, but regardless of the calculation the government failed to show it was making sincere efforts to find a country to take Abrego. The attorney said the administration is holding him “for political purposes” and to avoid going back on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s vow that Abrego will never walk the streets of America again.
During a separate court session Friday in Nashville, the judge presiding over Abrego’s criminal case set a hearing for Nov. 3 to take evidence and possibly testimony about whether the charges should be dismissed on the grounds that the Trump administration instituted them to lash back at Abrego for defeating the government in court over his illegal deportation.
