The Trump administration warned in immigration court on Thursday that if Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s recent attempt to open an asylum case in the United States is successful, government officials will seek to deport him back to El Salvador, according to a copy of the court filing obtained by The New York Times.
The filing indicates the administration is opening another front in its efforts to expel Mr. Abrego Garcia from the United States for a second time — this time back to his homeland, where a court already ruled that he cannot be sent because he could face threats or persecution there.
Trump administration officials have repeatedly maintained that they will not allow Mr. Abrego Garcia to go free in the United States. And last month, after he was released from custody in the separate criminal case he is facing and then quickly rearrested, they originally said they were considering expelling him to Uganda.
But in a filing in immigration court in Baltimore linked to his asylum request, Trump administration officials seriously raised the idea that sending him back to El Salvador was also an option. They said that opening an asylum case would essentially nullify the earlier ruling that he could not be sent back to his home country.
“Should the Immigration Court grant the respondent’s motion to reopen, D.H.S. will pursue the respondent’s removal to El Salvador,” the Trump administration argued in its filing. It said the earlier ruling “will no longer be valid” if the asylum case moves forward.
The asylum request, which was filed in late August, was the latest twist in the legal cases surrounding Mr. Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant who was deported in March to a notorious terrorism prison in El Salvador because of an administrative error. That removal, officials eventually acknowledged, violated a court ruling issued in 2019 that had expressly barred his being sent to the country where he feared his life could be in danger.
But since then, he has become a symbol of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration tactics. U.S. officials insist he will never go free in the United States, while his attorneys accuse the administration of trying to make an example of him, regardless of the rule of law.
In its filing to the immigration court in Baltimore, Trump officials said that they would seek to overturn the decision barring Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador, claiming it was no longer valid.
When Mr. Abrego Garcia obtained that order, he had also applied for asylum. But while the immigration judge who considered his initial application found the asylum request to be “credible,” he pointed out that Mr. Abrego Garcia had not filed within a year of arriving in the United States as required under the law.
Since his arrest by immigration officials on Aug. 25, Mr. Abrego Garcia has been held in a detention center in Virginia. He is fighting the government’s efforts to expel him from the country again on two tracks — through his asylum request and through a separate civil case that would prevent officials from sending him to Uganda, a country to which he has no ties.
“The government’s campaign of retribution continues because Mr. Abrego refuses to be coerced into pleading guilty to a case that should never have been brought,” Sean Hecker, one of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, said at the time of his arrest.
After his arrest, Homeland Security Department officials maintained that he would be removed from the United States.
“President Trump is not going to allow this illegal alien, who is an MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser and child predator to terrorize American citizens any longer,” Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said in a statement.
The judge hearing the Uganda deportation case, Paula Xinis, has barred the administration from sending Mr. Abrego Garcia anywhere outside the United States for at least the next few months. Judge Xinis intends to hold a hearing on the possible expulsion to Uganda on Oct. 6 and issue a decision no more than 30 days later.
Even as he fights re-deportation, Mr. Abrego Garcia and his lawyers have been fending off the criminal charges that were brought against him in June in the Federal District Court in Nashville. Those charges, filed 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.
His attorneys deny those charges and say the government brought them only in a vindictive effort to punish him for having mounted a legal challenge against his initial deportation.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
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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