Washington (AFP) – The US government wants to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man at the center of a row over President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, to Liberia and possibly by month’s end, a court filing showed Friday. The case of Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported to El Salvador in March and then sent back to the United States in June, has become a lightning rod for those opposed to Trump’s efforts to carry out mass deportations across the United States.
The Trump administration alleges he is a violent MS-13 gang member involved in smuggling other undocumented migrants. His lawyers have filed a suit contesting his deportation, and a federal judge in August blocked an attempt to send Abrego Garcia, who is married to a US citizen and denies all wrongdoing, to Uganda.
In Friday’s filing, government attorneys say they have identified the west African country of Liberia as a site for “removal,” as it was not on a list of countries that Abrego Garcia’s attorneys had rejected out of hand. “Liberia is a thriving democracy and one of the United States’s closest partners on the African continent,” attorneys said in the filing in a US federal court in Maryland. The government noted that Liberia is an English-speaking country and is “committed to the humane treatment of refugees.” It said it could complete the deportation “as soon as October 31.”
Abrego Garcia’s lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said ICE is seeking to deport his client “to Liberia, a country with which he has no connection, thousands of miles from his family and home in Maryland.” “Costa Rica stands ready to accept him as a refugee, a viable and lawful option. Yet the government has chosen a course calculated to inflict maximum hardship. These actions are punitive, cruel, and unconstitutional,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said in a statement on his law firm’s website.
Abrego Garcia had been living in the United States under protected legal status since 2019, when a judge ruled he should not be deported because he could be harmed in his home country. He then became one of more than 200 people sent to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison in March as part of Trump’s crackdown on undocumented migrants. But Justice Department lawyers admitted that the Salvadoran had been wrongly deported due to an “administrative error.” Abrego Garcia was returned to US soil months later, only to be detained again in Tennessee on human smuggling charges, a separate case from the Maryland proceedings.
Right-wing supporters praise the Republican president’s toughness, but legal scholars and human rights advocates have blasted what they say is a haphazard rush to deport people without even a court hearing, in violation of basic US law.
© 2024 AFP
