A high-stakes legal clash over immigration policy moved back into a Maryland federal courtroom this week, as U.S. government attorneys reaffirmed on Tuesday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) remains committed to deporting Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia — even after a new bilateral agreement with Costa Rica to accept migrants who cannot be safely returned to their home countries.
Abrego Garcia’s case has emerged as one of the most high-profile flashpoints in the ongoing national U.S. debate over immigration enforcement, rooted in a catastrophic administrative error by federal authorities last year. The 30-year-old, who has lived in Maryland for years, is married to a U.S. citizen and shares a child with her, and entered the country illegally as a teenager. Back in 2019, an immigration judge had already formally ruled that he could not be deported to his native El Salvador, citing documented threats against him and his family from a violent local gang that put his life at risk. Despite this court-ordered protection, immigration officials mistakenly deported him to El Salvador anyway in 2024.
Facing intense public backlash and a binding court order, the Trump administration ultimately arranged for Abrego Garcia to be returned to the U.S. in June 2024. But before his return, authorities secured a controversial indictment on federal human smuggling charges in Tennessee. Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty to all counts and has filed a motion to dismiss the criminal case entirely.
Since his return to U.S. soil, Abrego Garcia has been locked in a battle to block a second deportation, which DHS officials have proposed to a series of unnamed African nations. He has long argued that if deportation is ultimately required, he should be sent to Costa Rica, which has previously agreed to accept him under existing deportation protocols. However, Todd Lyons, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), pushed back against this proposal in a March internal memo, arguing that transferring Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica would be “prejudicial to the United States.” Lyons noted that the U.S. has already invested significant government resources and political capital in negotiating an agreement with Liberia to accept third-country deportees, making the West African nation the only acceptable destination.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, who presides over the case, had previously barred ICE from detaining Abrego Garcia or moving forward with his deportation, arguing that federal authorities have never presented a viable, realistic plan to carry out the removal. Back in February, she criticized the agency’s sequence of proposals, dismissing them as “one empty threat after another to remove him to countries in Africa with no real chance of success.”
During Tuesday’s hearing, Ernesto Molina, director of the Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation, sparked pushback from the judge when he suggested that Abrego Garcia could simply “remove himself” to Costa Rica to resolve the impasse. Judge Xinis rejected that suggestion outright, calling the idea a “fantasy” — pointing out that Abrego Garcia remains facing active criminal prosecution in Tennessee, and cannot legally leave the jurisdiction while the case is pending.
Xinis has since set a formal briefing schedule for the legal dispute, with the next hearing in the case scheduled for April 28, as the court continues to sort through conflicting claims over the government’s deportation authority and the legality of its proposed plan.