The Justice Department floated sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia, marking the administration’s latest effort to remove the once-deported man amid its ongoing prosecution of him.
The Friday court filing said the West African nation has agreed to take him and argued that the country fit Abrego Garcia’s criteria.
“Although Petitioner has identified more than twenty countries that he purports to fear would persecute or torture him if he were removed there, Liberia is not on that list,” the Department of Justice (DOJ) wrote.
The Trump administration has explored a series of countries as possible deportation destinations after wrongly sending Abrego Garcia to his native El Salvador. An immigration judge in 2019 blocked him from being sent there due to gang threats against his family.
After several months being held in Salvadoran prisons, the Trump administration secured Abrego Garcia’s return, only to hit him with human smuggling charges in connection with a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee in which he was spotted with numerous men without luggage in the van.
Abrego Garcia has denied wrongdoing and has also sought to dismiss the case, arguing he is being selectively and vindictively prosecuted by the Trump administration given the interest in his story.
A Tennessee-based federal judge backed an initial request for discovery, passing a key hurdle to allow the claim to move forward.
As the case proceeds, the Justice Department has argued immigration authorities still have the right to carry out his deportation, a matter that has also been tied up in federal court in Maryland.
In various filings, the Justice Department has proposed deporting him to Uganda, Ghana and Eswatini, while Abrego Garcia has floated Costa Rica as an option.
Attorneys for Abrego Garcia have previously accused the DOJ of having “spun the globe” to pick locations to “troll” their client.
“Having struck out with Uganda, Eswatini and Ghana, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] now seeks to deport our client Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Liberia – a country with which he has no connection, thousands of miles from his family and home in Maryland,” attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said in a statement.
“Costa Rica has agreed to accept him as a refugee, and remains a viable and lawful option. Instead, the government has chosen yet another path that feels designed to inflict maximum hardship. Their actions are punitive, cruel and unconstitutional.”
In the Friday filing, the DOJ argued Liberia should be an amenable choice for Abrego Garcia.
“Liberia is a thriving democracy and one of the United States’s closest partners on the African continent,” they wrote.
“Its national language is English, the same as the country in which Petitioner has resided for the last several years; and it modeled its constitution, which has been in place since 1986 and which provides robust protections for human rights, in large part on the U.S. Constitution. Liberia also is committed to the humane treatment of refugees.”
