Kilmar Ábrego Garcia is set to be back in court as he battles deportation to Liberia

WASHINGTON (AP) — Kilmar Ábrego Garcia on Tuesday will be back in federal court, where the federal government will continue its attempt to deport him in an 18-month saga that began when he was mistakenly sent to El Salvador last year.

The government is moving to vacate a preliminary injunction put in place by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis preventing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from detaining and deporting Ábrego Garcia to the West African country of Liberia. His legal team is seeking to make the injunction permanent. The judge left previous orders in place last December and ordered him released from custody.

The Salvadoran national’s case became a focal point in the immigration debate after he was mistakenly deported to his home country last year. Since his return, he has been fighting a second deportation to an African country as proposed by Department of Homeland Security officials.

Ábrego Garcia argued that if he were going to be deported, it should be to Costa Rica, which previously agreed to take him. But Todd Lyons, the former acting director of ICE, said in a March 2026 memo that deporting Ábrego Garcia to Costa Rica would be “prejudicial to the United States,” because the U.S. had expended resources and political capital negotiating with Liberia to accept third-country nationals.

The push for deportation to Liberia continued even after the U.S. signed an agreement with Costa Rica to accept deportees who cannot legally be returned to their home countries.

“The government is leading the same rodeo as many times before. Sending Kilmar to Costa Rica is on the table. However, the government continues to punish him for pursuing his constitutional rights and seeks to ship him to Liberia,” said Jossie Flor Sapunar, the national communications director for We Are CASA, an activist group that has supported Ábrego Garcia and his family and intends to be at the courthouse. “Kilmar has become an international symbol of due process, a symbol which the Trump administration wants to silence.”

She added in an email that the family deserves privacy, either at home in Maryland or in Costa Rica.

Ábrego Garcia, 31, has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the U.S. illegally as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge ruled that he could not be deported to El Salvador because he faced danger there from a gang that had threatened his family.

He was arrested in Baltimore in March 2025 after picking up his then-5-year-old son, who has autism and other disabilities, from his grandmother’s house, according to court papers.

Ábrego Garcia was then sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador known as CECOT, which activists say is rife with abuses and where inmates are packed into cells and never allowed outside. ICE officials admitted in court filings that his deportation there was an “administrative error.”

Facing public pressure and a court order, President Donald Trump’s Republican administration brought him back in June 2025, but only after securing an indictment charging him with human smuggling in Tennessee. A federal judge dismissed that case in May 2026, finding that the Justice Department’s pursuit of criminal charges was designed to punish Ábrego Garcia for challenging his deportation. The government is appealing.