In the case of Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran who has become a symbolic figure among critics of the Donald Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies, a court has once again sided with García. On the 17th, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Sinis of Maryland ruled to bar García from being re-detained after his release, according to the Associated Press and other news agencies.
Sinis criticized the Department of Homeland Security for “persisting in empty threats to send him to African countries without any real prospect of success.” The court then ruled that “there is no sufficient reason to believe that (Garcia’s) deportation will occur in the reasonably foreseeable future.”
The court ruled that since the government has had 90 days to arbitrarily detain someone subject to deportation, a credible and specific deportation plan is now required before Garcia can be detained again. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) argued to the court that it would deport Garcia to African countries like Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana, and Liberia, but the court rejected that argument. Judge Sinis ruled that the government “deliberately and without justification ignored the only country (Costa Rica) that has consistently offered to accept Garcia as a refugee and to which he has agreed to go.”
In effect, the court blocked the government’s attempt to detain Garcia in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility for political retaliation, even though it had no plans to deport him from the United States. Last year, the case of Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to his native El Salvador despite being a legal resident of the United States due to a government error, became a political embarrassment for the Trump administration. Garcia came to the United States illegally as a teenager but has since lived in Maryland with his American citizen wife and child and is now a legal resident.
In 2019, an immigration judge ruled that Garcia could not be deported to El Salvador due to the danger posed by gangs targeting his family. However, in March of last year, Garcia was deported to El Salvador and held in a notorious terrorist detention centre there. He was later returned to the United States in June of last year after it was revealed that his deportation had been an administrative error.
The Trump administration charged Garcia with child trafficking upon his deportation and remanded him in an ICE facility, but a court ordered his release in December of last year.