If Abrego Garcia is deported to Uganda, here’s how it might happen : NPR

A member of the Congressal Hispanic Caucus takes a photo of Kilmar Abrego Garcia at a press conference to discuss his arrest and his deportation on April 9 in Washington, DC the Trump administration wants to deport him to Uganda.

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Images Alex Wong / Getty

The Trump administration says that it intends to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia – The man who was wrongly sent to Salvador in March before being returned to the United States – in Uganda, a country with which he has no connection, in what experts describe as an expensive, complex and legally questionable decision.

A federal judge from Maryland set a next hearing for October 6 and blocked his expulsion before that. In the meantime, ABREGO GARCIA’s lawyers said on Wednesday that he wanted to ask for asylum in the United States as part of a new complaint based on fear of persecution.

In a statement on Monday, the secretary of internal security, Kristi Noem, justified the targeting by the administration of Abrego Garcia by repeating allegations against him. “President Trump will not allow this illegal foreigner, who is a member of the MS-13 gang, a trafficker of human beings, a serial domestic attacker and a children’s predator, to terrorize American citizens,” said Noem.

Abrego Garcia, a national Salvadoran, denied allegations. He was not sentenced for any crime and was officially accused of being a member of a gang.

Abrego Garcia, who has a family in Maryland, returned to the United States in June, after spending several weeks in the notorious prison of Centro de Confinamiento del de Terrorismo of El Salvador – known as Cecot. He was then immediately detained, after being charged with human smugglers in Tennessee. Last week, he was released from pre -trial detention, but was then arrested by ICE agents on Monday in Baltimore.

US officials said they would send Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica if he had pleaded guilty and served a sentence in the United States, but he refused the offer.

For the moment, he is detained in a detention center in Virginia. But his ultimate fate remains vague.

If the courts finally approve its withdrawal, here is the process by which it could happen.

A flight escorted

Abrego Garcia would probably be placed on an chartered passenger plane or military transport, accompanied by ice agents who are part of the agency’s application and dismissal operations unit (ERO), according to César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, professor of law at the Ohio State University who studies immigration.

“It would be physically chained – most likely at the ankles, sometimes also handcuffed – throughout the duration of the flight, which could be many hours,” explains García Hernández.

If Abrego Garcia is sent by the passenger jet, he would be unusual if he was the only one expelled on the flight, he said. “Most uses of ice creams from planes are large passenger planes – Boeing 737 – and that is why we generally do not see ice cream at a time. These flights are simply too expensive.”

Jacqueline Stevens, professor of political science at the Northwestern University, says that when people were expelled in South Sudan, some were avecés to Djibouti on a private jet, then from Djibouti to South Sudan in a military plane. (However, these flights have also been faced with legal challenges and may not be indicative of what is happening on future thefts.)

She says that the optics of sending Abrego Garcia by himself would not be good, in particular for an administration which was billed as the use of taxpayers’ money. “It will not be a good look” for the ice, she says.

Earlier this year, immigration officials admitted that Abrego Garicia’s expulsion in Salvador was due to an “administrative error”. He performed in violation of an immigration judge in power in 2019 that he was expelled, but no return to Salvador, where he had a “well -founded fear” of the persecution of the gangs.

The Ugandan Foreign Ministry said last week that it had concluded a “temporary” agreement with the United States to accept the deportees, saying that this was intended for people “who may not be given asylum in the United States, but who are reluctant to or may have concerns about returning to their country of origin”.

He said that as a condition of the agreement, “individuals with legal records and unaccompanied minors will not be accepted”. He also said that Uganda “prefers” to take individuals from other African countries.

NPR has contacted the Ugandan Embassy and the Ministry of Internal Security for specific information on how the withdrawal and transfer of Abrego Garcia could occur. Ugandan officials did not respond immediately. DHS referred to the original Noem declaration without providing details.

Although the case of Abrego Garcia is still judged, he would not be the first migrant to be expelled in a third country in recent months. In July, the United States withdrew five migrants from Eswatini, a landlocked kingdom in southern Africa formerly known as Swaziland. This same month, eight men were sent to South Sudan, only one of whom was from there. More than 250 Venezuelans were repatriated following detention in the same Salvadoral prison which housed Abrego Garcia.

Anwen Hughes, director of the legal strategy for human rights refugee programs, says that it is not illegal for the United States to try to expel a person in a third country, but the law “forces them to browse a country hierarchy before deciding to send, for example, a Vietnamese person in South Sudan,” she said. “They don’t seem to work this way.”

Hughes is part of a legal team which filed a request for a class certification and a temporary prohibition order in March, contesting the ICE policy on the retirement of individuals to third countries without notice.

“It is very unusual for the United States to expel someone to a country in which it has no connection,” explains García Hernández. “Almost always, the deportations are to the country of a person’s citizenship or the previous residence.”

Transfer to landing in Uganda

Once the plane transporting Abrego Garcia and his ice escorts land in Uganda, the agents will probably put documents reaching his identity, his criminal history and his medical records, according to García Hernández. “At this stage, the United States is mainly completed.”

From there it would be in Uganda to decide what to do, he said.

“All allegations of criminal activity are an equitable game for Ugandan officials,” he said, adding that “it is a difficult sale for a foreign government to welcome someone that the American president and his cabinet have repeatedly described as horribly dangerous”, despite the lack of abrego Garcia locker.

We do not know what would happen to Abrego Garcia once in Uganda, explains Nelson Kasfir, professor emeritus of government in Dartmouth who studies Africa. “I don’t think they hold or hurt him,” said Kasfir. “I also doubt that they were getting it back quickly, but it’s more difficult to say.”

Kristof Titeca, professor at the University of Antwerp in Belgium who has been studying African governance, notes that this is not the first time that Uganda has welcomed “failed asylum seekers” from other countries. In 2018, for example, he welcomed Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers expelled from Israel. In this case, they were allowed to stay in a Kampala hotel for a few nights, “then left for themselves,” he said. “Contrary to what has been promised to them, they did not obtain a residence permit either. Many of them decided to flee in Europe.”

Opposition personalities in Uganda have rejected the program, claiming that parliament in the largely authoritarian country had not been said in the agreement with the details of American details to remain widely unknown on the agreement negotiated between President Yoweri Museveni – who seeks to extend his settlement of almost 40 years in the elections of next year – and the United States

“We do not know the exact arrangement, the circumstances, which are brought, how much are brought,” the head of the opposition in Parliament told NPR. “If these are considered to be unsuitable for the United States, what makes them able to be here in Uganda?”

García Hernández thinks that by sending Abrego Garcia in Uganda, “Trump administration is trying to go around the order of an immigration judge who prohibits expulsion to Salvador by triangulating – sending him first to Uganda.”

Sandoval-Moshenberg, lawyer for Abrego Garcia, told NPR that Uganda has given no assurance that his client can remain in this country and “not be quickly reformed in his country of citizenship”.

Halima athumani in Kampala, Uganda, contributed the reports.