Donald Trump’s administration has repeatedly threatened to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to at least five different countries during an ongoing legal battle to remove the Salvadoran immigrant at the center of the president’s anti-immigration agenda.
Now, the government has landed on a new country, where he could end up as soon as October 31: Liberia.
The Department of Justice said Friday that the government is making “final necessary arrangements” for his removal to the West African country, which the administration claims has agreed to accept him as early as Halloween.
Abrego Garcia’s legal team told The Independent that the move is “punitive, cruel and unconstitutional.”
Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported to his native El Salvador in March, kicking off a high-profile legal battle to bring him back to the U.S. After federal judges and the Supreme Court ordered the government to reverse his “illegal” removal, the Trump administration brought him back in June — but only so he could face new criminal charges alleging he smuggled immigrants across the country. He has pleaded not guilty.
In El Salvador, Abrego Garcia spent several weeks inside a brutal prison, where he was says he was subject to “severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture.”
Upon returning to the U.S., he reunited with his family in Maryland for a weekend after he was briefly released from federal custody in the criminal case — only to end up back in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the Trump administration tries, so far unsuccessfully, to deport him again.
The administration previously outlined a plan to deport him to Costa Rica — but only if he agreed to plead guilty to human smuggling charges. If Abrego Garcia didn’t, he would be sent to Uganda, the government said.
Then, Trump officials suggested he could be sent back to his home country of El Salvador if he were to successfully reopen a case for asylum in the U.S. The judge overseeing his immigration case has rejected that attempt.
Last month, ICE officials said he would be sent to Eswatini, a tiny African nation at the center of the administration’s attempts to deport immigrants to countries where they have no citizenship, family or other connections.
An email from an ICE official to Abrego Garcia’s legal team said the administration chose Eswatini because he has stated that he fears persecution and torture in other countries. Homeland Security also said he would be deported to Ghana, a notice that officials later admitted was “premature.”
The governments of Ghana, Eswatini and Uganda have all declined to accept him.
Earlier this month, Abrego Garcia’s legal team said he is prepared to leave the country for Costa Rica, an offer that the Trump administration appears to have rescinded.
“Although Petitioner has identified more than [20] countries that he purports to fear would persecute or torture him if he were removed there, Liberia is not on that list,” government lawyers wrote Friday.
They argued that “Liberia is a thriving democracy and one of the United States’s closest partners on the African continent,” with “robust protections for human rights” and “protections for refugees and vulnerable populations.”
Liberia’s foreign minister Sara Beysolow Nyanti met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week, according to a press release from the country’s ministry of foreign affairs.
“Having struck out with Uganda, Eswatini and Ghana, ICE now seeks to deport our client Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia – a country with which he has no connection, thousands of miles from his family and home in Maryland,” his attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, told The Independent.
“Costa Rica has agreed to accept him as a refugee, and remains a viable and lawful option,” he added. “Instead, the government has chosen yet another path that feels designed to inflict maximum hardship. Their actions are punitive, cruel and unconstitutional.”
Lawyers are scheduled to return to court to discuss Abrego Garcia’s criminal case and immigration case November 3.
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