Federal judge to decide whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia should return to immigration custody
GREENBELT, MD. (AP) — A federal judge on Monday will hear arguments on: Kilmar Abrego Garcia must then be returned to immigration detention to be free for a little over a week.
Abrego Garcia, mistaken deportation The visit to El Salvador, which has become a lightning rod for both sides of the immigration debate, has been a place where immigrants have been detained since August. At the time, the government announced that it planned to deport him. Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana and lately, Liberia. But authorities made no effort to deport him to the only country he agreed to go to: Costa Rica. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis marylandHe even accused the government of misleading him by claiming that Costa Rica did not want to take him.
The government’s “persistent refusal to accept Costa Rica as a valid deportation option, its threats to deport Abrego Garcia to African countries that never agreed to take him in, and its false statements to the Court that Liberia was now the only country available to Abrego Garcia, all reflect that whatever the purpose behind his detention, it was not the ‘primary purpose’ of timely deportation by a third country,” he wrote.
Xinis’ Dec. 11 order that Abrego Garcia be released from immigration custody concluded that the immigration judge who heard his case in 2019 had not ordered deportation from the United States and that he could not be deported anywhere without a deportation order.
Abrego Garcia has an American wife and child. lived in Maryland He lived for many years, but immigrated to the United States illegally from El Salvador in his youth. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection against repatriation, finding he was in danger of a gang targeting his family. He had already been deported there by mistake in March. U.S. officials have resisted calls to bring him back until the Supreme Court rules. But authorities said he could not stay in the United States and vowed to deport him. third country.
In filings filed last week, government lawyers argued that they were still working to deport Abrego Garcia, whether or not there was a final deportation order, so they could legally detain him throughout the process.
“If there is no final deportation order, immigration proceedings are ongoing and the Petitioner will be subject to pre-final deportation detention,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that the detention must be ‘non-criminal’ because “immigration proceedings are ‘civil, not criminal.'” In Abrego Garcia’s case, they argued that the detention was punitive because the government wanted to be allowed to detain him indefinitely without a viable plan to deport him.
“If the detention of immigrants does not serve the legitimate purpose of carrying out a reasonably foreseeable deportation, it is punitive, potentially indefinite, and unconstitutional,” they wrote.
