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A federal judge will hear arguments Monday about whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia should be returned to immigration custody after being free for more than a week.
Abrego García, whose wrongful deportation El Salvador Immigration has become a lightning rod for both sides of the debate, having been in immigration detention since August. In that time, the government has said it plans to deport him. ugandaeswatini, ghana And, recently, liberiaHowever, authorities have made no efforts to deport him to the country he has agreed to go to – costa ricaU,S, District Judge Paula Zinis in Maryland also accused the government of misleading them by falsely claiming that Costa Rica was unwilling to take them,
The government’s “continued refusal to accept Costa Rica as a viable removal option, their threats to send Abrego García to African countries that never agreed to take him, and their misrepresentations to the court that Liberia was now the only country available for Abrego García, all demonstrate that whatever the motive behind his detention, it was not for the ‘fundamental purpose’ of timely removal to a third country,” she wrote.
Abrego García was released from immigration custody in Zinis’s December 11 order, which also concluded that the immigration judge who heard his case in 2019 had failed to issue an order of removal from the U.S., and that he cannot be deported anywhere without a removal order.
Abrego Garcia has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the US illegally from El Salvador as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from deportation back to his home country, finding that he faced danger there from a gang that had targeted his family. In March, he was sent there by mistake anyway. US officials resisted calls to bring him back until the Supreme Court’s decision. However, authorities have said he cannot remain in the US and have vowed to deport him to a third country.
In filings last week, government lawyers argued that with or without a final order of removal, they are still working to deport Abrego García so they can legally detain him during the process.
“If there is no final order of removal, immigration proceedings continue, and the petitioner may be detained pending a final order,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Abrego García’s lawyers cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that “because immigration proceedings are ‘civil, not criminal’ the detention must be ‘non-punitive’.”
“If immigration detention does not serve the legitimate purpose of effecting reasonably anticipated removal, it is punitive, potentially indefinite, and unconstitutional,” they wrote.