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GREENBELT, Md. (CN) — A top U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official testified on Friday that Eswatini had rejected an initial request by the Trump administration to accept Kilmar Ábrego García should the government attempt to deport him there.
John Schultz Jr., deputy assistant director for removal management at ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, said the Trump administration only began discussions with the small African nation — the only absolute monarchy in Africa — on Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis scheduled Friday’s evidentiary hearing after an unproductive proceeding on Monday, where the Justice Department offered no information regarding plans for Ábrego García.
The Barack Obama appointee ordered the Justice Department to turn over documents related to his case, including any efforts taken to remove Ábrego García to a third country, what steps have been taken since he filed his habeas petition in August and anything relevant to the likelihood that he might be deported to Eswatini in the near future.
Andrew Rossman, a lawyer with the firm Quinn Emanuel and part of Ábrego García’s legal team, told Xinis that the government’s purported efforts to deport him to Eswatini, Uganda or (most recently) Ghana are clear efforts to troll and punish him for challenging his wrongful removal to El Salvador.
If the government truly wished to deport him immediately, Rossman said, Ábrego García has indicated he would accept removal to Costa Rica, where he has received assurances that he would not be returned to El Salvador.
He urged Xinis to find his detention vindictive and order his release. He cited the 2001 Supreme Court decision in Zadvydas v. Davis , where the high court ruled that the Immigration and Nationality Act created an “implicit time limitation” for immigration detention and does not permit indefinite detention.
Since his wrongful removal in March, Ábrego García has remained behind bars for nearly seven months, including in the CECOT mega prison in El Salvador, a Tennessee jailhouse upon his return in June, and finally in ICE detention since Aug. 25
“They are using detention as a means of punishment,” Rossman said.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign, lead courtroom defender of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, argued that Xinis should not release Ábrego García because his detention in El Salvador and his criminal detention do not count toward the Zadvydas time limitation.
As for Schultz, he appeared to have little more than tangential or surface-level knowledge regarding Ábrego García’s case, stating that he spent five hours in preparation for his testimony after being designated to speak on the government’s behalf. That follows another hearing in July, where Xinis compared trying to get answers from ICE to “nailing Jell-O to a wall."
The DOJ pushed for executive privilege to protect the contents of calls that Schultz made in preparation for arguments. Those include two calls with the Homeland Security Council, headed by Stephen Miller, who has repeatedly vowed to deport Ábrego García.
After Schultz was excused from the witness stand, Xinis expressed repeated frustration with his lack of knowledge. She warned Ensign that she felt the government had blatantly ignored her order to hear from someone involved in decisions regarding Ábrego García’s potential deportation.
Prior to the hearing, Ábrego García’s attorneys reportedly received notice that the Department of Homeland Security had once again changed the country he could be deported to, this time to Ghana. DHS quickly walked the notice back as “premature” and told the attorneys to disregard it.
Ghana’s foreign minister Sam Okudzeto Ablawka made clear in an X post Friday morning that Ghana was not an option in Ábrego García’s case.
“He cannot be deported to Ghana,” Ablakwa said. “This has been directly and unambiguously conveyed to U.S. authorities. In my interactions with U.S. officials, I made clear that our understanding to accept a limited number of noncriminal West Africans, purely on the grounds of African solidarity and humanitarian principles, would not be expanded.”
After walking back a plan to send him to Uganda, the Trump administration indicated it plans to eventually deport Ábrego García to the small African nation Eswatini — one of 21 nations where he has expressed fear of persecution.
Ábrego García’s attorneys have warned that the Trump administration chose Uganda, Eswatini and Ghana specifically because none of these countries has provided assurances that their client will not be repatriated back to El Salvador, where they say he was tortured in the infamous CECOT megaprison.
Rossman added Friday that he and his colleagues only learned that morning that Uganda had also rejected the government’s request to deport Ábrego García there, describing the government’s conduct as a “runaround” and “made up.”
“This is all with one goal in mind: to never allow Mr. Ábrego to walk the streets of this country again,” Rossman said. “That is not an appropriate use of the detention authority.”
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