A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot re-detain Kilmar Abrego Garcia because a 90-day detention period has expired and the government has no viable deportation plan.
The Salvadoran national’s case has become a focus of the immigration debate since he was wrongfully deported to his home country last year. Since his return, he has been fighting a second recommendation by Homeland Security officials to deport him to a series of African countries.
The government “repeatedly made empty threats to deport him to an African country with no real chance of success,” U.S. District Judge Paula Hines in Maryland wrote in Tuesday’s order. “From this, the court readily concluded that there was no ‘good reason to believe’ that eviction was likely to occur in the reasonably foreseeable future.”
Abrego Garcia has an American wife and children and has lived in Maryland for many years but immigrated to the United States illegally as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge ruled that he could not be deported to El Salvador because he faced danger there from gangs that threatened his family. Regardless, he was mistakenly deported there last year.
Facing public pressure and court orders, President Donald Trump’s administration brought him back to the United States in June, but only after he obtained an indictment on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. He pleads not guilty. Meanwhile, Trump officials say he cannot stay in the United States. In court documents, officials said they intended to deport him to Uganda, Swaziland, Ghana and Liberia.
In Tuesday’s order, Sinise said the government “willfully and without justification ignored a country that had offered to accept Abrego Garcia as a refugee and to which he had agreed to travel.” That country was Costa Rica.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moschenberg, argued in court that immigration detention should not be a punishment. Detain immigrants only as a way to facilitate deportation and not indefinitely without a viable deportation plan.
“Since Judge Sinise ordered Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release in mid-December, the government has tried one trick after another to try to get Mr. Abrego Garcia back into custody,” Sandoval-Moschenberg wrote in an email Tuesday. “In today’s decision, she recognizes that if the government had truly tried to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia from the United States, they would have sent him to Costa Rica.”
