An immigration judge has rejected a request by Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March and then brought back to face criminal charges, to seek asylum in the United States.
The decision by the judge in Baltimore on Wednesday foreclosed one of the options that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers had tried in an effort to keep him in the country. While the ruling meant that a final order of removal that was first imposed on Mr. Abrego Garcia in 2019 remained in place, the Trump administration cannot deport him again until a separate case he filed in Federal District Court in Maryland is resolved.
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s asylum request, which was filed in August, added to an already complex web of cases that he has found himself involved in since mid-March, when the Trump administration deported him in error to a notorious terrorism prison in El Salvador, his homeland.
Even though Mr. Abrego Garcia was in the country illegally at the time and was subject to removal, Trump officials acknowledged that his expulsion to El Salvador violated a provision of the 2019 decision that had expressly barred him from being sent to that country because he feared his life could be in danger there.
Since bringing Mr. Abrego Garcia back to U.S. soil to face federal charges of immigrant smuggling, administration officials have said they want to expel him again — this time to a country other than El Salvador. Officials have offered a shifting array of plans, saying first that they wanted to deport Mr. Abrego Garcia to Uganda and then to the small African nation of Eswatini.
Those plans have been stymied, his lawyers have said, by the fact that the Trump administration has apparently not reached agreements with either country to accept him. The plans have also been blocked for the moment by a federal judge in Maryland, Paula Xinis, who has barred the administration from expelling Mr. Abrego Garcia to any third country until she holds a hearing on Monday to determine whether the process the government is seeking to use is in fact legal.
On Wednesday, lawyers for the Justice Department asked Judge Xinis to put on hold all of the deadlines in the case in front of her, presumably including Monday’s hearing, because of the recent government shutdown. As of Thursday afternoon, the judge had not ruled on the request.
Even as he fights re-deportation, Mr. Abrego Garcia has also been fending off criminal charges brought against him in 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.
In August, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers sought to have the case thrown out as a vindictive prosecution by the Justice Department.
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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