Donald Trump’s administration now intends to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man it unlawfully sent to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, to Uganda — after he refused a plea deal, was released from jail, and was allowed to return to his family.
“We are not going to stop coming after him,” a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. “If this criminal wanted amnesty, he should have prayed for Kamala to win. She didn’t. President Trump did… He isn’t getting away.”
By its own actions, the Trump administration has made Abrego Garcia a public symbol of its cruel and inhumane treatment of migrants. As Abrego Garcia and his family have racked up victories, big and small, against Trump in court, the administration has lashed out with increasing intensity.
Multiple sources familiar with the matter say that several top Trump officials, including White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, believe that if Abrego Garcia and his legal team were to score a sustainable legal victory, it would be a significant blow to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda — and therefore Abrego Garcia cannot be allowed to win. In recent weeks, several contingency plans were developed for different ways to punish or deport him, to try to ensure that any individual court victory Abrego Garcia might secure would be met with a trap door.
In March, Trump unlawfully sent Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where the Maryland father says he was tortured, in defiance of a court order barring his deportation there. For two months, the administration disregarded a Supreme Court order demanding his return, before suddenly bringing him back to the U.S. to face new alien smuggling charges in Tennessee.
With that Tennessee case faltering, Trump officials apparently gave Abrego Garcia a disturbing choice. If he pled guilty, once his sentence is complete, he could go to Costa Rica, which would offer him refugee status or residency. Beat Trump in court again, and Trump would pull the rug out from under him and send him to Uganda, a country the State Department says Americans should reconsider traveling to due to threats of terrorism and violent crime.
After the Tennessee court let Abrego Garcia out of jail on Friday and allowed him to return home to his family in Maryland, Trump officials quickly announced their intent to deport him to Uganda, even though the criminal case remains ongoing. On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security told Abrego Garcia’s lawyers that he could be sent to Uganda in a matter of days.
“We will not stop fighting till this Salvadoran man faces justice and is OUT of our country,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said in a statement on Friday. In the statement she also called him a “monster.”
Abrego Garcia rejected part of the Trump Justice Department’s plea deal on Saturday, according to the Associated Press.
The lawyers called the choice the government gave him “coercive,” adding that there is “little doubt that the entire federal government is engaged in a coordinated effort to punish Mr. Abrego for fighting back against its unlawful conduct.” They have also called the treatment “prosecutorial misconduct.”
“Heightening the constitutional concern, the government has engaged in these tactics through two agencies — DOJ and DHS — that it has previously represented were ‘separate agenc[ies] with separate leadership [and] separate direction’ that could not control one another,” the lawyers wrote. “But these two agencies are obviously working in lockstep to coerce Mr. Abrego into accepting a guilty plea in his criminal case, holding over his head the prospect of possible indefinite detention — or worse — in a country halfway across the world. It is difficult to imagine a path the government could have taken that would have better emphasized its vindictiveness.”
The Trump administration, in what it’s claimed was an “administrative error,” wrongfully deported Abrego Garcia to prison in El Salvador for three months, where he was severely beaten and psychologically tortured, according to his lawyers.
The Maryland resident and father of three came from El Salvador to the U.S. in 2011, and in 2019 he was given protection from deportation because he would face gang violence.
While the Tennessee court previously ordered Abrego Garcia’s release on bail, he remained in jail for some time because his attorneys worried that the Trump administration would try to deport him again, this time to a third-party country, if he was freed. An immigration official said in July that officials might send him to Mexico or South Sudan.
On Thursday, the country of Uganda agreed to accept deported migrants who do not have criminal records and are not unaccompanied minors.
“The agreement is in respect of third country nationals who may not be granted asylum in the United States but are reluctant to or may have concerns about returning to their countries of origin,” Bagiire Vincent Waiswa, permanent secretary of Uganda’s foreign ministry said.
The prospect of deportations to Uganda “runs afoul of international law,” human rights lawyer Nicholas Opio told the AP on Thursday. “We are sacrificing human beings for political expediency; in this case, because Uganda wants to be in the good books of the United States. That I can keep your prisoners if you pay me; how is that different from human trafficking?”
