Abrego Garcia seeks asylum in US after Trump deportation battle

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has become the face of US President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration agenda, wants to seek asylum in the United States, his lawyers told a federal judge on Wednesday.

Abrego Garcia, 30, was detained on Monday in Baltimore by US Customs and Immigration Enforcement after leaving a Tennessee jail on Friday. The Trump administration said it intends to deport him to the African country of Uganda. Administration officials have said he is part of the dangerous MS-13 gang, an allegation Abrego Garcia denies.

The Salvadorean national’s lawyers are fighting the deportation efforts in court, arguing he has the right to express fear of persecution and torture in Uganda. Abrego Garcia has also told immigration authorities he would prefer to be sent to Costa Rica if he must be removed from the US.

He had been denied asylum in 2019 by a US immigration judge because he applied for asylum more than a year after he fled to the US. He left El Salvador at the age of 16 around 2011 to Maryland to join his brother, who had become a US citizen.

Although the immigration judge denied asylum for Abrego Garcia, the judge did issue an order shielding Abrego Garcia from deportation to El Salvador. That is because he faced credible threats of violence from a local gang there that had terrorised him and his family.

Abrego Garcia was released under federal supervision in 2019 and continued to live with his American wife and children in Maryland until this year. But the Trump administration deported him to a notorious El Salvador prison in March.