The Trump administration plans to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a “third country” eventually, meaning not El Salvador, where he is from and was mistakenly sent back to earlier this year.
A Justice Department lawyer said on Thursday there wasn’t a timeline for the deportation.
“There are no imminent plans to remove him to a third country,” DOJ lawyer Jonathan Guynn told a federal judge in Maryland at a brief court appearance Thursday.
The disclosure arose in the hearing when US District Judge Paula Xinis declined at this time to stop the Trump administration from hastily deporting Abrego Garcia again in the coming week, even while he faces criminal charges.
The undocumented immigrant still appears to be in limbo on what’s next for him – and the Trump Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department now may be at odds.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers fear he may be sent to an unspecified country that isn’t El Salvador in the coming days, once he is released from criminal custody, which could happen as soon as Friday.
While the Trump administration’s deportation of Abrego Garcia to El Salvador violated a 2019 order from an immigration judge that said he could not be deported to his home country due to fears that he would face gang violence, the order does not preclude his deportation to another country.
His attorneys asked Xinis for help making sure Abrego Garcia stays in the country, because the Maryland-based judge was handling a civil challenge related to his recent El Salvador deportation. She will not be set to rule, however, until July 7 at the earliest.
The judge said Thursday she is unsure if she has the power to block his deportation again or bring him from Tennessee to Maryland.
Abrego Garcia is currently in pre-trial detention in Tennessee, under the control of a court there, but soon will be released from that court’s authority and turned over to DHS, according to the legal proceedings.
The Trump administration has said it plans to continue to hold Abrego Garcia in immigration detention, under DHS.
“If DHS were to then turn around and frustrate Mr. Abrego’s prosecution while those very charges are pending by removing him from the United States, that would mean the Executive Branch has no confidence in this trumped up case,” his lawyers wrote in another court filing on Thursday.
In Tennessee’s federal court, he has pleaded not guilty to criminal charges of human smuggling.
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