Abrego Garcia’s attorneys blast government for ‘unilaterally’ rearresting him

Attorneys for wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia on Tuesday blasted government officials for “unilaterally” rearresting him on Monday in Baltimore and for their intention to deport him to Uganda.

In a motion filed Tuesday, lawyers representing Abrego Garcia in his criminal case said they oppose the government’s request for more time to respond to their accusation of “vindictive and selective prosecution.” A magistrate judge in Tennessee granted the government’s request for an extension.

“Ordinarily, we would agree, as a matter of professional courtesy, to a request for an extension, after first consulting with our client,” the attorneys said in their filing. “But the government has unilaterally re-arrested our client, notified us of its intention to deport him to Uganda, and rendered him (at least temporarily) unavailable to us.”

Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native, was deported in March to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison — despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation to that country due to fear of persecution — after the Trump administration claimed he was a member of the criminal gang MS-13, which his family and attorneys deny.

He was brought back to the U.S. in June to face charges in Tennessee of allegedly transporting undocumented migrants within the U.S. while he was living in Maryland, to which has pleaded not guilty. After being released on Friday while awaiting trial, he was taken into immigration custody upon checking in with the ICE office in Baltimore on Monday, and his attorneys say they were told that he may be deported to Uganda after he rejected a plea deal to be deported to his preferred destination of Costa Rica in exchange for pleading guilty to the human smuggling charges.

Abrego Garcia’s layers said in Tuesday’s filing that the government is “depriving” him of the pre-trial release ordered by the Tennessee court and argued that the government should not receive an extension “to mitigate the consequences it caused.”

The attorneys said the government “repeatedly failed to persuade courts of its inflammatory and false allegations” about Abrego Garcia and accused the government of not being interested in seeing what “American justice looks like.”

“It is difficult to reach any conclusion other than that the government seeks to delay its response until after Mr. Abrego is deported, at which point it will argue that it does not have to respond at all, and that the Court need not decide the motion,” Abrego Garcia’s attorneys said.

In a filing on Monday, the government, arguing for an extension to respond to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, pushed back on the claim that the government made an attempt to “coerce” Abrego Garcia into an involuntary plea of guilty.

Robert McGuire, the Acting United States Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, said the government had never offered a third-party country placement for Abrego Garcia as part of a plea to his criminal charges.

“The Government, in good faith, began in earnest to search for a third-party country placement which was described by the defendant as a necessary part of any plea agreement,” McGuire said.

“Prior to this demand, the Government had never offered a third-party country placement for the defendant as part of a plea to his criminal charges. Much less had the Government made an attempt to ‘coerce’ the defendant into an involuntary plea of guilty as the defendant now claims,” said McGuire.

Abrego Garcia is currently at a detention center in Virginia. A federal judge in Maryland has temporarily blocked his deportation pending a further hearing.