The Justice Division floated sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia, its newest effort to take away the mistakenly deported man amid their ongoing prosecution of him.
The Friday courtroom submitting mentioned the West African nation has agreed to take him and argued that the nation match Abrego Garcia’s standards.
“Although Petitioner has identified more than twenty countries that he purports to fear would persecute or torture him if he were removed there, Liberia is not on that list,” DOJ wrote.
The Trump administration has explored a collection of nations as attainable deportation locations after wrongly sending Abrego Garcia to his native El Salvador. An immigration choose in 2019 blocked him from being despatched there as a consequence of gang threats in opposition to his household.
After a number of months being held in Salvadoran prisons, the Trump administration secured Abrego Garcia’s return, solely to hit him with human smuggling fees in reference to a 2022 site visitors cease in Tennessee wherein he was noticed with quite a few males with out baggage within the van.
Abrego Garcia has denied wrongdoing and has additionally sought to dismiss the case, arguing he’s being selectively and vindictively prosecuted by the Trump administration given the curiosity in his story.
A Tennessee-based federal choose backed an preliminary request for discovery, passing a key hurdle to permit the declare to maneuver ahead.
Because the case proceeds, the Justice Division has argued immigration authorities nonetheless have the precise to hold out his deportation, a matter that has additionally been tied up in federal courtroom in Maryland.
In varied filings, the Justice Division has proposed deporting him to Uganda, Ghana, and Eswatini, whereas Abrego Garcia has floated Costa Rica as an possibility.
Attorneys for Abrego Garcia have beforehand accused DOJ of getting “spun the globe” to choose places to “troll” their consumer.
“Having struck out with Uganda, Eswatini and Ghana, ICE now seeks to deport our client Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia – a country with which he has no connection, thousands of miles from his family and home in Maryland,” lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg mentioned in an announcement.
“Costa Rica has agreed to accept him as a refugee, and remains a viable and lawful option. Instead, the government has chosen yet another path that feels designed to inflict maximum hardship. Their actions are punitive, cruel and unconstitutional.”
Within the Friday submitting, DOJ argued Liberia must be an amenable selection for Abrego Garcia.
“Liberia is a thriving democracy and one of the United States’s closest partners on the African continent,” they wrote.
“Its national language is English, the same as the country in which Petitioner has resided for the last several years; and it modeled its constitution, which has been in place since 1986 and which provides robust protections for human rights, in large part on the U.S. Constitution. Liberia also is committed to the humane treatment of refugees.”
