Officials from three different African nations have said they won’t let the US deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to their countries, potentially frustrating the Trump administration’s plans to keep him in custody.
The rejections – two of which were revealed by a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in a Maryland courtroom on Friday – could lead a federal judge to order the administration to release Abrego Garcia from immigration custody for now, if she decides that his deportation does not appear imminent.
The countries – Uganda, Eswatini and Ghana – have said at various points in recent weeks that they would not allow Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man unlawfully deported to El Salvador in mid-March and later brought back to the US to face human smuggling charges, to be put on a plane and sent to their territories.
Under a 2019 court order, US officials are barred from sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, his home country, which he fled years earlier amid threats of gang violence.
US District Judge Paula Xinis did not rule Friday on the request from Abrego Garcia to be released from the detention facility he’s being held at in Pennsylvania. But in a lengthy hearing, she appeared at times to be unconvinced that the government had shown a compelling reason to keep him detained.
The hearing was the latest episode in Abrego Garcia’s ongoing attempt to get courts to intervene in his immigration case to ensure the Trump administration doesn’t run roughshod over his due process rights months after he was wrongly deported.
Several states away on Friday, another set of attorneys for Abrego Garcia went before a federal judge in Nashville to sort out how much they can pry into the Trump administration’s innerworkings as they seek to have his criminal charges thrown out based on their claim that he’s being unfairly prosecuted.
His team told US District Judge Waverly Crenshaw that they will ask him in the coming days to force federal prosecutors to hand over communications from senior Justice Department officials, including Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, as part of the court-ordered fact-finding process that will help buttress their bid to get the case dismissed.
Prosecutors say the decision to indict Abrego Garcia rested with Tennessee’s acting US Attorney Robert McGuire and that McGuire was not influenced by Trump administration officials.
“Any communications between senior government actors themselves about this case, but which did not influence the Acting United States Attorney because they did not reach him or were not communicated to him (i.e. not “tied to the actual decisionmaker”), would not be discoverable,” the government wrote in court papers this week.
Judge unhappy with ICE’s testimony
In Greenbelt, Maryland, ICE official John Schultz spent hours testifying about what steps the Trump administration has taken or will soon take to re-deport Abrego Garcia.
But while Xinis appeared to view his testimony as largely unhelpful, Schultz’s revelations about what officials from Uganda and Eswatini have told the Trump administration showed that the government has run into major issues with finding a third country that will accept Abrego Garcia.
After he was released from pre-trial custody in Tennessee this summer, immigration officials notified Abrego Garcia of their intention to deport him to Uganda. He quickly said that he feared being sent there due to a fear of facing torture or persecution, and officials later told him they were planning to send him to Eswatini.
“How did it change from Uganda to Eswatini?” Sascha Rand, an attorney for Abrego Garcia, asked at one point.
“My understanding is that Uganda ultimately said ‘no,’” Schultz replied.
At another point during his testimony, Schultz said that he was told that US officials first asked Eswatini if they would be willing to accept Abrego Garcia this week and that as of Friday morning, the country had said they wouldn’t allow for his removal there.
But, Schultz added, discussions with Eswatini are “ongoing.”
At times, Xinis, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, appeared annoyed by Schultz’s inability to provide answers to some basic questions about what the administration is doing to remove Abrego Garcia a second time from the US. She compared his testimony to some that was given earlier this year.
“We have the same problem today,” Xinis said. “Three strikes and you’re out.”
What about Costa Rica?
This summer, after Abrego Garcia objected to being sent to Uganda, he designated Costa Rica as the country he’d prefer to be deported to. The Central American country has said that it would accept him and give him some form of legal status.
That decision featured prominently in Friday’s hearing, with Xinis repeatedly questioning why the officials hadn’t committed to sending him there.
On Thursday, officials noted their intention to send Abrego Garcia to Ghana, but quickly disavowed that plan the same day. Hours before the hearing started Friday, an official from the African nation said on social media that it, too, would not accept a US plan to send him there.
Those three rejections, an attorney for Abrego Garcia told Xinis, made clear that there was no good reason for the government’s continued detention of their client.
“This game that they’re effectively playing of naming one country after another, having them say, ‘No thank you,’ … I think that what that shows is the real aim of the government – and an improper one – is just to keep him incarcerated,” the attorney, Andrew Rossman, said.
Miranda rights issue
In Nashville, attorneys for Abrego Garcia told Crenshaw it’s possible federal agents failed to properly read their client his Miranda rights after his arrest in March, when he was taken into custody and sent days later on a plane to El Salvador.
They said they plan to file several motions – including over possible coercion from the agents – to suppress statements Abrego Garcia made when he was detained.
They also told Crenshaw they plan to file motions to remove language from the indictment they say is unrelated to the human smuggling charges, including claims their client is part of the notorious MS-13 gang.
“Agents with Homeland Security stopped our client, detained him,” and conducted a “custodial interview,” defense attorney Jenna Dabbs told the judge Friday. They did so, Dabbs said, without probable cause and may have coerced Abrego Garcia and never warned him of his rights to remain silent or be represented by an attorney before interviewing him.
Accusations that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13 have been touted by Homeland Security, Justice Department and White House officials, including President Donald Trump, who once showed an image of Abrego Garcia’s hand tattoos, arguing they represented the letters and numbers “MS-13.”
In a major ruling last week, Crenshaw said that Abrego Garcia had “sufficiently presented some evidence that the Government had a stake in retaliating against him” after he successfully challenged his unlawful deportation earlier this year.
CNN’s Holmes Lybrand reported from Nashville; Devan Cole and Angelica Franganillo Diaz reported from Greenbelt, Maryland.
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