The Trump administration plans to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Uganda following his Aug. 22 release from custody in a months-long fight to remove him from the country, court filings showed.
On Friday, a magistrate judge ordered Abrego Garcia, 30, released from a Tennessee jail and returned to Maryland where he and his family live while he faces smuggling charges. The Salvadoran national, a sheetmetal worker, had been held in custody for months after the administration wrongly deported him to a megaprison in El Salvador.
But as it became clear he’d be released, filings posted Saturday showed the administration has tried to send him to other countries. USA TODAY has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement for comment.
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The day before his release, Costa Rican officials offered to take Abrego Garcia as a refugee or resident after any criminal sentence he’d serve in the United States, according to the letter dated Thursday from Costa Rica’s security minister Mario Zamora Cordero to the American Embassy.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, Sean Hecker, said the administration attempted to offer him removal to Costa Rica in exchange for pleading guilty to two smuggling charges. In a filing to the federal district court in Tennessee, Hecker wrote that it had become clear Abrego Garcia would be released at the end of the week, and the government made a “last-ditch effort to forestall that release” in exchange for guilty pleas and to stay in jail until Monday.
Abrego Garcia declined to stay in jail and was released Friday.
After his release, Charles Wall, an ICE lawyer, wrote to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers in a Friday email that he’d have to report to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations office in Baltimore on Monday. A minute later, at 4:01 p.m., Wall said Homeland Security officials may remove Abrego Garcia to Uganda no earlier than 72 hours from then, absent weekends.
Hecker said the case should be dismissed and that Abrego Garcia is being coerced into accepting a guilty plea by the prospect of being indefinitely detained in a country halfway across the world, where his safety and liberty would be at threat. A 2023 State Department report warned of significant human rights issues in the landlocked East African country, including “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.”
“It is difficult to imagine a path the government could have taken that would have better emphasized its vindictiveness,” he said.
Since he was detained in March, Abrego Garcia has found himself at the center of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. This included removing him and hundreds of other migrants accused of gang ties, with little or no evidence, to the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.
The Trump administration said they couldn’t return him despite wrongly deporting him, but ended up returning him under court pressure to then face the smuggling charges stemming from a 2022 traffic stop.
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Tennessee federal judges found him eligible for release as he fights his case. His lawyers feared he’d be immediately placed in ICE custody and quickly deported. Judges allowed him to postpone his release.
A Maryland federal judge ensured he wouldn’t be immediately apprehended by ICE in Tennessee. It gave him some reprieve with 72 hours’ notice before any plans to deport him.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump admin. wants to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Uganda: Filings
