Washington — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man who was taken into immigration custody after he was released pending a criminal trial, has asked an immigration judge to reopen his immigration proceedings and is seeking asylum in the United States, his lawyer said during a court hearing Wednesday.
Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Abrego Garcia’s attorney, told a federal judge overseeing a legal challenge to his immigration detention that the Salvadoran man made the request Tuesday, one day after he was taken back into custody by U.S. immigration authorities in Baltimore.
Abrego Garcia had been summoned for an interview with Immigration and Customs Enforcement at its Baltimore field office after he was released from criminal custody in Tennessee on Friday while awaiting trial on human smuggling charges, according to a notice. When he arrived at the Baltimore office, Abrego Garcia was then taken into custody by ICE and was being processed for deportation to Uganda, the Department of Homeland Security said.
But Abrego Garcia swiftly filed a petition challenging the legality of his detention, and U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis issued an order temporarily blocking his removal to Uganda.
At a brief status hearing Wednesday, Xinis, who is overseeing the cases filed by Abrego Garcia, extended her temporary restraining order until at least early October, keeping Abrego Garcia in ICE detention in the U.S. until she rules on his habeas petition.
Her order blocks the Trump administration from removing Abrego Garcia from the continental U.S. and ensures that he remains in an ICE detention center within 200 miles of Greenbelt, Maryland, so he has access to attorneys in his civil and criminal cases. Abrego Garcia is being held at a facility in Virginia, Sandoval-Moshenberg said earlier this week.
Justice Department lawyer Drew Ensign said that the Department of Homeland Security is “committed” to not removing Abrego Garcia until Xinis rules, but said the government objected to the extension of the temporary restraining order.
Xinis scheduled an evidentiary hearing for Oct. 6 and said she planned to issue a decision within 30 days.
A Salvadoran national who came to the U.S. unlawfully in 2011, Abrego Garcia was deported to a prison in El Salvador in March. But the government said his deportation to El Salvador was an administrative error, as Abrego Garcia had legal protection that prohibited immigration officials from removing him to his home country because of possible persecution by local gangs.
Abrego Garcia filed a lawsuit over his deportation, and Xinis, who was assigned the case, ordered the Trump administration in April to facilitate his return. The Department of Homeland Security resisted doing so for weeks, but in early June, Abrego Garcia was brought back to the U.S. after a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of human smuggling.
Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty to the two counts, and a judge in Tennessee, where he was charged, ordered him released on bail while awaiting trial, which is set to begin in January. Abrego Garcia left criminal confinement in Tennessee on Friday and returned to Maryland, where he has lived for more than a decade.
But he soon learned that the Trump administration would be seeking to deport him to Uganda. Abrego Garcia raised fears of persecution and torture if removed to the East African country and formally designated Costa Rica as the country to which he wanted to be removed, according to court papers.
Abrego Garcia applied for asylum in 2019, but an immigration judge in Maryland said he waited too long to do so. Federal immigration law requires an asylum-seeker to file an application within one year of their arrival to the U.S. The immigration judge said in a 2019 decision that Abrego Garcia filed his application for asylum seven years after he came to the U.S., “well-beyond the one-year filing deadline.”
Still, the judge who evaluated Abrego Garcia’s request for asylum said he provided “credible responses” to questions and provided “substantial documentation” bolstering his claim for asylum, including affidavits from family members describing threats by a local gang.
“His testimony was internally consistent, externally consistent with his asylum application and other documents, and appeared free of embellishment,” the immigration judge, David Jones, wrote, adding that “the court finds the respondent credible.”
While Abrego Garcia’s application for asylum was denied at that time, Jones did grant him a withholding of removal, the legal status that shielded him from deportation to El Salvador.
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