GREENBELT, Md. (AP) — A federal judge will hear arguments Monday over whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia should be returned to immigration detention more than a week after his freedom.
Abrego Garcia, who became a lightning rod for both sides of the immigration debate when he was wrongly deported to El Salvador, has been in immigration detention since August. At the time, the government said it planned to deport him to Uganda, Swaziland, Ghana and, most recently, Liberia. However, officials took no steps to deport him to the country he agreed to go to – Costa Rica. U.S. District Judge Paula Hines in Maryland even accused the government of misleading her by falsely claiming that Costa Rica was unwilling to take him.
She wrote that the government’s “consistent refusal to recognize Costa Rica as a viable deportation option, threats to send Abrego Garcia to African countries that never agreed to take him, and their false representation to the court that Liberia was the only country that could now accept Abrego Garcia all reflect that whatever the purpose behind his detention was, it was not the ‘essential purpose’ of deporting him promptly to a third country.”
Xinis ordered Abrego Garcia to be released from immigration detention on Dec. 11, which also concluded that the immigration judge who heard his case in 2019 failed to issue an order to remove him from the United States and that he cannot be removed from anywhere without a deportation order.
Abrego Garcia has an American wife and children and has lived in Maryland for many years, but he immigrated to the United States illegally from El Salvador as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge found he faced danger in his home country from criminal gangs targeting his family and granted him protection from deportation to his home country. In any case, he was mistakenly deported there in March. U.S. officials refused to bring him back to the United States until the Supreme Court intervened. However, officials said he could not stay in the United States and vowed to deport him to a third country.
In documents filed last week, government lawyers argued that they were still working to deport Abrego Garcia with or without a final deportation order in order to legally detain him in the process.
“If there is no final order of deportation and immigration proceedings are ongoing, the applicant will be subject to pre-final order detention,” they wrote.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, meanwhile, cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that “because immigration proceedings ‘are civil and not criminal,’ detention must be ‘non-punitive.'” They argued that in Abrego Garcia’s case, the detention was punitive because the government wanted to be allowed to detain him indefinitely without a viable deportation plan.
“If immigration detention fails to serve the legitimate purpose of achieving reasonably foreseeable removal, it is punitive, potentially indefinite, and unconstitutional,” they wrote.
