Attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a Friday letter that they intend to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the African nation of Eswatini after he expressed a fear of deportation to Uganda.
The letter from ICE to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys was earlier reported by Fox News. It states that his fear of persecution or torture in Uganda is “hard to take seriously, especially given that you have claimed (through your attorneys) that you fear persecution or torture in at least 22 different countries. …Nonetheless, we hereby notify you that your new country of removal is Eswatini.”
Eswatini’s government spokesperson told The Associated Press on Saturday that it had no received no communication regarding Abrego Garcia’s transfer there.
The Salvadoran man lived in Maryland for more than a decade before he was mistakenly deported to El Salvador earlier this year. That set off a series of contentious court battles that have turned his case into a test of the limits of President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies.
Although Abrego Garcia immigrated to the U.S. illegally around the year 2011, when he was a teenager, he has an American wife and child. A 2019 immigration court order barred his deportation to his native El Salvador, finding he had a credible fear of threats from gangs there. He was deported anyway in March — in what a government attorney said was an administrative error — and held in the country’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center.
Facing a court order, the Trump administration returned him to the U.S. in June only to charge him with human smuggling based on a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee. While that court case is ongoing, ICE now seeks to deport him again. For his part, Abrego Garcia is requesting asylum in the United States.
He was denied asylum in 2019 because his request came more than a year after he arrived in the U.S., his attorney Simon Sandoval-Mosenberg has said. Since he was deported and has now re-entered the U.S., the attorney said he is now eligible for asylum.
“If Mr. Abrego Garcia is allowed a fair trial in immigration court, there’s no way he’s not going to prevail on his claim,” he said in an emailed statement.
As part of his asylum claim, Abrego Garcia expressed a fear of deportation to Uganda and “nearly two dozen” other countries, according an ICE court filing in opposition to reopening his asylum case. That Thursday filing also states that if the case is reopened, the 2019 order barring his deportation to El Salvador would become void and the government would pursue his removal to that country.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.