Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who was re-arrested this week as officials sought to deport him for a second time, has asked a judge to grant him asylum, his lawyers said on Wednesday, opening up what amounted to a new legal avenue for him to remain in the United States.
The revelation that Mr. Abrego Garcia was seeking asylum came during a hearing in Federal District Court in Maryland that was held to discuss the next steps in a separate legal challenge that his lawyers filed on Monday in their effort to stop the administration from carrying out his second deportation — this one to Uganda.
The asylum request, submitted to a Maryland immigration judge, added to the increasingly complex web of cases that Mr. Abrego Garcia has found himself involved in since March, when the Trump administration deported him in error to a notorious terrorism prison in El Salvador, his homeland. That removal, officials eventually acknowledged, violated a court order that had expressly barred him from being sent to the country where he feared his life could be in danger.
Even as he fights re-deportation, Mr. Abrego Garcia and his lawyers have also been fending off criminal charges brought against him in Federal District Court in Nashville. Those charges, filed in June in coordination with his return from El Salvador, accuse him of having taken part in a conspiracy to smuggle undocumented immigrants across the United States from 2016 until this year.
At the hearing in Maryland, Judge Paula Xinis, who has been handling Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation cases, told the government that it could not send him anywhere outside of the United States for at least the next few months. Judge Xinis said that she would hold a hearing on Oct. 6 to determine whether he might face danger, even torture, if he is expelled to Uganda, adding that she plans to issue a decision no more than 30 days later.
Since his arrest on Monday, Mr. Abrego Garcia has been held in an immigration detention center in Virginia and his lawyers said that they had no plans to ask for his release at least until the hearing was held in October. Judge Xinis ordered the administration to keep him locked up within 200 miles of her courtroom as his new legal challenge moves forward.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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