Washington — The Justice Department said Friday that the Trump administration is seeking to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia and said the West African nation has agreed to accept him.
In a filing with a federal judge in Maryland, Justice Department lawyers said that immigration officials expect to formally notify Abrego Garcia later Friday that Liberia has been designated as the new country of removal. They said the Trump administration expects to be able to deport Abrego Garcia as soon as Oct. 31.
The administration has “received diplomatic assurances regarding the treatment of third-country individuals removed to Liberia from the United States and are making the final necessary arrangements for [Abrego Garcia’s] removal,” they wrote.
In the court filing, the Justice Department said that Abrego Garcia had identified more than 20 countries that he fears would persecute or torture him if he were removed there, and Liberia is not on the list.
“Liberia is a thriving democracy and one of the United States’s closest partners on the African continent,” they wrote.
Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Abrego Garcia’s attorney, said the administration “has chosen yet another path that feels designed to inflict maximum hardship.”
“Their actions are punitive, cruel and unconstitutional,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said. “Unless Liberia guarantees that it will not re-deport Mr. Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, then sending him to Liberia is no less unlawful than sending him directly to El Salvador a second time.”
The Trump administration’s plan to remove Abrego Garcia to Liberia comes as the Maryland judge, Paula Xinis, is weighing whether to release the Salvadoran man from immigration custody while a challenge to the Department of Homeland Security’s ongoing efforts to deport him for a second time moves forward.
Abrego Garcia was removed to his home country of El Salvador in March and imprisoned there despite having been granted a legal status in 2019 that prohibited the Department of Homeland Security from removing him there because of possible persecution by local gangs. An immigration official with the Trump administration admitted that Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador was an error, and Xinis ordered the Department of Homeland Security to facilitate his return to the U.S.
But immigration officials resisted doing so for months. Abrego Garcia was brought back to the U.S. in June, but only after a federal grand jury in Tennessee indicted him on two charges of human smuggling stemming from a November 2022 traffic stop.
Abrego Garcia pleaded not guilty to the charges, and a judge in Tennessee said he should be released on bail ahead of the criminal trial, which is set to begin in January. But he remained in criminal confinement for several more weeks because his lawyers were concerned that the Trump administration would arrest him again upon his release and deport him.
Abrego Garcia was released from the Putnam County Jail in Tennessee in August and returned to Maryland, where he has lived since coming to the U.S. illegally in 2011. Days later, he was taken into custody by immigration authorities after being summoned for an interview at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Baltimore. The Trump administration notified Abrego Garcia’s lawyers he may be deported to Uganda, though Abrego Garcia expressed fear of persecution and torture, as well as a concern that the Ugandan government would send him back to El Salvador.
Since then, the Trump administration has searched for countries to accept Abrego Garcia and has sought to remove him to the African nations of Eswatini and Ghana. Neither of those two countries nor Uganda have agreed to take him. Abrego Garcia has said he would go to Costa Rica and designated it as his preferred country of removal. While Costa Rica has indicated it would provide him refugee status or residency, a Justice Department lawyer said during a hearing earlier this month there had not been discussions about deporting him there.
Sandoval-Moshenberg, his lawyer, reiterated on Friday that Costa Rica “remains a viable and lawful option.”
Xinis has forbidden the Trump administration from deporting Abrego Garcia while she considers his challenge to his ongoing detention by immigration officials and the efforts to remove him again.
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