The Justice Department said Monday that Trump officials would immediately begin the process of expelling Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the country again if he is released from custody next week on charges filed after his wrongful deportation to El Salvador in March.
That plan, laid out by a Justice Department lawyer at a hearing in U.S. District Court in Maryland, directly contradicted a statement by the White House last month describing the possibility that the administration might redeport Abrego Garcia as “fake news.”
At the hearing, Judge Paula Xinis, who is overseeing the original civil case emerging from the wrongful deportation, expressed frustration at the government’s shifting statements about its plans to handle Abrego Garcia. The statements in court by the Justice Department lawyer, Jonathan Guynn, further muddied an unclear picture of Abrego Garcia’s future after the administration abruptly returned him to the United States last month to face criminal charges.
At one point, Xinis described the “complete chaos” that had arisen from Abrego Garcia’s being “caught” between his civil case in Maryland and his criminal case in U.S. District Court in Nashville, Tennessee.
Abrego Garcia is in custody in Nashville, where he has been indicted on charges of taking part in a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle immigrants in the country illegally across the United States. Even though a federal magistrate judge has said he can go free because he was not a flight risk or a danger to the community, his lawyers asked that he remain locked up for the moment, fearing that the administration might seek to deport him again.
There has been persistent confusion about what might happen to Abrego Garcia almost from the moment he was brought back from his erroneous expulsion to El Salvador.
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