After struggling for weeks to find a foreign country willing to accept Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March, the Trump administration floated a new plan on Friday. It said that the African nation of Liberia had agreed to take him in.
In a brief court filing, lawyers for the Justice Department said that Mr. Abrego Garcia, who was brought back to face criminal charges and is now being held by immigration officials, could be removed to Liberia as soon as Oct. 31. But that plan could be delayed, even derailed, if his lawyers mount a challenge to this latest effort to expel him.
The proposal to deport Mr. Abrego Garcia to Liberia was the latest twist in a byzantine saga that has transformed him over the past seven months from an unknown Salvadoran migrant living in Maryland into one of the best-known symbols of President Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda.
Virtually from the moment in August that a federal judge released Mr. Abrego Garcia from custody on the criminal charges he is facing and immigration authorities rearrested him, the Trump administration has scrambled to find a country to which to deport him for a second time. Administration officials appear to be driven by a promise made by several top aides to Mr. Trump that Mr. Abrego Garcia would never walk free on U.S. soil.
In recent weeks, the administration has floated plans to expel Mr. Abrego Garcia to three other African countries — Uganda, Eswatini and Ghana — but in the end, each proposal foundered because U.S. officials were unable to secure agreements from their counterparts overseas. In a move that has persistently perplexed Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, the White House has stubbornly refused to send him to Costa Rica — the one place to which he has agreed to go and which has also agreed to accept him.
Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, called the plan by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to send his client to Liberia “punitive, cruel and unconstitutional,” adding that it would also be unlawful unless the Liberian government guaranteed it would not send him right back to El Salvador upon receiving him. Three courts, including the Supreme Court, have determined that his original expulsion to El Salvador was improper because it violated a previous court order that expressly forbade him to be sent there.
“The government has chosen yet another path that feels designed to inflict maximum hardship,” Mr. Sandoval-Moshenberg added.
In the filing by the Justice Department, its lawyers described the country as “a thriving democracy and one of the United States’ closest partners on the African continent.”
The Information Ministry for Liberia said on social media that it had reached an agreement with the United States.
“Liberia’s actions are guided by both international humanitarian norms and its own longstanding tradition of offering refuge to those in need,” it said in a statement posted on Facebook.
The announcement of the Liberian proposal came as the Trump administration was under mounting pressure to figure out what to do with Mr. Abrego Garcia, whose intersecting legal proceedings have been in the public spotlight for months and tried the patience of two federal judges. Despite spending untold hours trying to do so, the White House has been unable to reach a resolution in any of civil cases stemming from his initial deportation, which are taking place in Maryland, or his criminal case, which is unfolding in Nashville.
Two weeks ago, Judge Paula Xinis, who is handling the civil cases, expressed strong doubt that the administration had the authority to continue detaining Mr. Abrego Garcia as it flailed about looking for a new place to which to deport him. Judge Xinis, who has already said that she might hold the administration in contempt for its past behavior in the civil cases, suggested she would order Mr. Abrego Garcia to be released if the government could not quickly come up with a viable plan to expel him from the United States again.
At the same time, the Justice Department is facing a potentially embarrassing hearing in Mr. Abrego Garcia’s criminal case next month, prompted by a ruling by Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., who found that there was a “realistic likelihood” that the charges were filed as part of a vindictive prosecution.
In his ruling, Judge Crenshaw singled out the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, for the “remarkable” comments he made about the indictment accusing Mr. Abrego Garcia of taking part in a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle undocumented immigrants across state lines.
On Monday, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers subpoenaed Mr. Blanche to testify in Federal District Court in Nashville about how the Justice Department arrived at its decision to charge Mr. Abrego Garcia — a move that, if successful, would place the department’s No. 2 official in a vulnerable hot seat. Prosecutors in Nashville who are handling the case have said that they will move to block the subpoena.
On Friday, even as Mr. Abrego Garcia’s civil lawyers prepared to fight his possible removal to Liberia, his criminal lawyers renewed their efforts to put Mr. Blanche on the witness stand.
“Ordinarily, a deputy attorney general found by a court to have made ‘remarkable’ statements possibly showing ‘actual vindictiveness’ would be on the first plane to Nashville, trying to clear his name,” the lawyers wrote. “Not here. Instead, the government is unwilling to explore, or explain — let alone defend — Mr. Blanche’s public remarks.”
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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