Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cannot re-detain Kilmar Ábrego García because a 90-day detention period has expired and the government has no viable plan for deporting him, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
The Salvadorian national’s case has become a focal point in the immigration debate after he was mistakenly deported to his home country last year. Since his return, he has been fighting a second deportation to a series of African countries proposed by Department of Homeland Security officials.
The government “made one empty threat after another to remove him to countries in Africa with no real chance of success”, US district judge Paula Xinis, in Maryland, wrote in her Tuesday order. “From this, the court easily concludes that there is no ‘good reason to believe’ removal is likely in the reasonably foreseeable future.”
Ábrego García has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the US 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 a gang that had threatened his family. By mistake, he was deported there anyway last year.
Facing public pressure and a court order, Donald Trump’s administration brought him back in June, but only after securing an indictment charging him with human smuggling in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty. Meanwhile, Trump officials have said he cannot stay in the US. In court filings, officials have said they intended to deport him to Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana and Liberia.
In her Tuesday order, Xinis noted the government has “purposely – and for no reason – ignored the one country that has consistently offered to accept Abrego Garcia as a refugee, and to which he agrees to go”. That country is Costa Rica.
Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Ábrego García’s attorney, argued in court that immigration detention was not supposed to be a punishment. Immigrants can only be detained as a way to facilitate their deportation and cannot be held indefinitely with no viable deportation plan.
“Since judge Xinis ordered Mr Ábrego García released in mid-December, the government has tried one trick after another to try to get him re-detained,” Sandoval-Moshenberg wrote in an email on Tuesday. “In her decision today, she recognized that if the government were truly trying to remove Mr Ábrego García from the United States, they would have sent him to Costa Rica long before today.”
