A high-ranking Costa Rican official said late Friday that the country remains willing to accept the deportation of Kilmar Abrego García, rebutting the Trump administration’s claims that the only possible destination for the Salvadoran immigrant is the West African nation of Liberia.
Security Minister Mario Zamora Cordero told The Washington Post that he had informed the U.S. Embassy in San José in August that the government would accept Abrego on humanitarian grounds and provide him legal residency. He reiterated that Costa Rica has the “highest human rights standards” and would receive Abrego “under humanitarian conditions that guarantee the full respect for his rights and liberties.”
“That position that we have expressed in the past remains valid and unchanged to this day,” Zamora Cordero said in a statement, responding to questions from The Post.
Costa Rica’s position contrasts sharply with the Trump administration’s court filings in recent weeks in a lawsuit Abrego’s lawyers filed seeking his release in the United States. Justice Department lawyers said in a legal brief Nov. 7 that the State Department determined Costa Rica would not accept him “without further negotiations and, likely, additional commitments from the United States.”
“Importantly, the Department of State advises that the Republic of Liberia is the only state willing to accept Petitioner without further negotiations or additional commitments by the United States,” the lawyers wrote.
Zamora Cordero said Costa Rica has not demanded additional negotiations.
“Costa Rica’s offer to receive Mr. Abrego Garcia for humanitarian reasons stands,” he said in the statement, adding that it would not require more negotiations.
Abrego, 30, is an undocumented immigrant who was living in Maryland with his American wife and children. He was arrested by federal immigration officers in March, and has spent most of the last eight months cycling in and out of prisons in the United States and El Salvador. The Trump administration illegally deported him to his native country that month despite a 2019 court order forbidding it because he could face persecution there from gangs.
After U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland ordered the government in April to facilitate Abrego’s return to the United States, the administration returned him in June only after federal prosecutors had secured an indictment against him for human smuggling. He has pleaded not guilty and sought to return to his family in Maryland. The Trump administration has kept him in immigration detention and sought to deport him to an alternate country.
The Trump administration’s assertion that he could only be sent to Liberia puzzled Xinis during a hearing on the case Thursday in Greenbelt, Maryland. She asked officials why they could not send Abrego to Costa Rica, noting that he was willing to go to that country, and expressed frustration that she did not have answers.
“That is not an open door,” Justice Department lawyer Drew Ensign replied. He suggested that Abrego could travel to Costa Rica after officers deport him to Liberia.
“Why do that, though?” the judge said.
Lawyers for Abrego have said the Trump administration is threatening to send him to African nations where he has never lived and has no family, friends or other contacts as punishment for asserting his legal rights and having challenged his deportation in March.
Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of his lawyers, said Friday that Costa Rica’s response “is just further evidence confirming what’s obvious to anyone that’s been paying any attention to this case, which is that the government is not acting in any normal way to carry out normal immigration procedures with respect to Mr. Abrego Garcia.”
He added that the administration is “trying to punish him. The only reason they don’t want to send him to Costa Rica is because he wants to go to Costa Rica.”
In August, the night before Abrego was set to be released from a Tennessee jail pending trial in the criminal case, federal prosecutors urged him to plead guilty to two counts of human smuggling, serve his sentence and be deported to Costa Rica, a Spanish-speaking country regarded as the safest in Central America.
When he declined, choosing to await trial with his family in Maryland, officials threatened to deport him within days to Uganda, a nation the State Department says is at ongoing risk of terrorist attacks, court records show. Abrego’s lawyers protested that the threat was to coercehim into pleading guilty.
After that fell through, they attempted to send him to Eswatini, Ghana, and then to Liberia.
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