WASHINGTON — As this issue of the Militant goes to press, there are late-breaking developments in Kilmar Abrego García’s case. Efforts to deport him to Liberia by Oct. 31 have been delayed.
U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland issued a new schedule that prevents Immigration and Customs Enforcement from deporting Abrego García until court hearings set in late November in Tennessee on the government’s criminal case against him take place. Xinis has put in place a court order barring his deportation for now.
The Tennessee hearing — on frame-up charges of “human trafficking” before Judge Waverly Crenshaw Jr. — will discuss evidence the criminal charges are in fact a vindictive effort by the Donald Trump administration to victimize Abrego García because of his courageous fight for justice.
Crenshaw has said the facts before him so far indicate this is the case.
The Justice Department is seeking to remove Abrego García to Liberia as rapidly as possible. This is the fourth African country the Trump administration has pressed to take Abrego García, and the only one to agree to take him. It is thousands of miles from his wife, children and family, a move the administration is taking to punish him for fighting against his deportation and the government’s frame-up against him.
“After failed attempts with Uganda, Eswatini and Ghana, ICE now seeks to deport our client to Liberia, a country with which he has no connection,” Abrego García’s lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, said in response. “Costa Rica stands ready to accept him as a refugee, a viable and lawful option. Yet the government has chosen yet another path that feels designed to inflict maximum hardship. Their actions are punitive, cruel and unconstitutional.”
In a gross violation of the constitutional right to due process, the 30-year-old sheet metal apprentice from Beltsville, Maryland, and member of the SMART union, was deported to El Salvador March 15, despite a standing court order barring the government from sending him there. Abrego García and his family had fled to the U.S. after they were threatened by gangs in El Salvador.
He was flown to the notorious maximum security CECOT prison March 15. His deportation was ruled an “administrative error” by the U.S. Supreme Court. But instead of being returned, he was held for 82 days and tortured.
Abrego García was removed from the U.S. after President Donald Trump and the Justice Department determined the 1798 Alien Enemies Act applied. Under this act, regardless of their status, citizens of a foreign country can be removed if they come from a country with which the U.S. government is at war. Trump used the act to detain and deport some 250 people accused of being members of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang from Venezuela. Trump claims the Nicolás Maduro government there is a “narco-terrorist” enemy of the U.S.
Erez Reuveni, a high-ranking Department of Justice lawyer who had been assigned to the prosecution of Abrego García, said in an interview on the CBS program “60 Minutes” Oct. 19 that he was ordered to tell the courts that Abrego García was a member of the MS-13, a Salvadoran gang, and a terrorist. When he refused, he was fired.
“That is not factually correct. It is not legally correct. That is, that is a lie,” he said, adding that Abrego García was denied his right to due process.
Protests reflecting the widespread support he won succeeded in forcing the government to return Abrego García to the U.S. in June, but he was immediately jailed on the trumped-up charges of “human smuggling” — crimes he insists he never committed.