(Washington) American justice seeks to expel a Salvadoran towards Uganda, denounced its lawyers on Saturday, a new episode of a case which saw this immigrant sent back to his native country, brought back and detained to the United States before being released on Friday.
It has been five months since the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was the subject of a legal battle in the United States and of exchanges at the highest level between the governments of Donald Trump and his Salvadoral counterpart Nayib Bukele.
In a document of federal justice in the Tennesse of the lawyers of Mr. Abrego Garcia – which Washington accuses of being a member of a “terrorist” gang which helps the illegal stay of immigrants – ask that these prosecution be abandoned.
According to this document, this Salvadoral father married to an American and living in Maryland refused to plead guilty of the loads of trafficking in human beings, which would have enabled her, according to an American proposal, to be sent to Costa Rica, a country not far from Salvador.
“But despite the guarantees of the Government of Costa Rica to accept it there, a few minutes after its release (Friday in Tennessee), a representative of ICE (the Federal Immigration Police, editor’s note) informed Mr. Abrego’s legal advice that the (American) government intended to expel it to Uganda and ordered it to present itself to the services of Ice”, according to the judicial document.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was released on Friday from a penitentiary center in Tennessee, where he had been detained since June, and found his family.
He had been expelled on March 15 without any other form of trial to a high security prison in Salvador, with more than 250 men, most of alleged belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren in Aragua, which Washington considers to be a “terrorist organization”.
The Trump administration had quickly recognized an “administrative error” concerning this man who certainly does not have a legal immigration status, but whose expulsion decree to Salvador had been definitively canceled in 2019.
But in April, when the American president received his Salvadoan counterpart, which became his partner in terms of illegal expulsions, Washington had estimated that the fate of Mr. Abrego Garcia was now in the hands of San Salvador.
At the end of a legal battle which had risen to the Supreme Court in Washington, Mr. Abrego had been brought back to the United States, before justice continued him immediately to assist in the illegal stay of migrants since 2016.
A judge had ordered in July his release pending his possible trial on January 27.
