Immigration attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick is accusing U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement of lying to a federal judge about why the agency won’t send Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica, a country that has been ready to take him for a full year.
In a series of posts on X, Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, argued the Trump administration is deliberately dragging out the case to punish Abrego Garcia, whose wrongful deportation to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison in March 2025 became one of the most damaging legal episodes of the president’s second term.
“Seriously; since August 2025, when Costa Rica said they would take him, Kilmar Abrego Garcia has said he’d go there,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote. “But ICE refuses to do so, and even lied to Judge Xinis about why. The Trump admin would rather not deport him than let him go to Costa Rica where he’d be safe.”
He added that the administration wants to send Abrego Garcia “to an African country far away from his American family” as retaliation for the political embarrassment his case has caused.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, an Obama appointee overseeing the Maryland habeas case, has made the same finding from the bench. In a 31-page December opinion ordering his release from ICE custody, Xinis wrote that government lawyers “affirmatively misled the tribunal” about Costa Rica’s willingness to accept him.
Xinis also blasted the administration’s “persistent refusal to acknowledge Costa Rica as a viable removal option, their threats to send Abrego Garcia to African countries that never agreed to take him, and their misrepresentation to the Court that Liberia is now the only country available.”
The government has floated deporting Abrego Garcia to Uganda, Ghana, Eswatini and Liberia over the past year. Officials in each country initially rejected or resisted the proposals, leaving Liberia as the administration’s current target despite Costa Rica’s standing offer of refugee status.
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have argued in court filings that the refusal to use Costa Rica is punishment for his “constitutionally protected activity” in fighting his wrongful removal.
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