Kilmar Abrego Garcia faces deportation to Uganda after surrendering to immigration authorities

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national and Maryland resident at the center of a high-profile immigration case, surrendered to U.S. immigration authorities in Baltimore on Aug. 25, and faces possible deportation to Uganda, a nation that recently agreed to accept certain deportees from the U.S., even those that have no ties to the country like Abrego Garcia.

His detention comes just days after he was released from a jail in Tennessee on Aug. 22, more than five months after his arrest and deportation to a notorious prison in El Salvador that U.S. courts later found unlawful. He returned to his family in Maryland, and was expected to be detained at his check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, on Aug. 25.

J. Kevin Appleby, senior fellow for policy at the Center for Migration Studies in New York and the former director of migration policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told OSV News, “Deporting him to Uganda far away from his family reveals the cruelty embedded in this administration’s immigration policies.”

“It sends a signal that this administration will stop at nothing to remove certain immigrants, even if they have a legal basis to remain,” Appleby said. “Part of the message to immigrants here is self deport or we will send you to a third country on another continent. He is being used to create even greater fear among immigrants, even those with legal status.”

Although the government acknowledged in court filings that there was an administrative error in deporting Abrego Garcia to a prison in El Salvador, the Trump administration said it was not seeking his return to the U.S. Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has a 5-year-old child, has not been convicted of a crime.

The Trump administration has alleged Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 gang member, but his lawyers have said there is no evidence he is in that gang.

In a post on X, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said, “ICE law enforcement arrested Kilmar Abrego Garcia and are processing him for deportation.”

“President Trump is not going to allow this illegal alien, who is an MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser, and child predator to terrorize American citizens any longer,” she said.

According to his lawyers, Abrego Garcia has not been convicted of a crime — he was only charged with smuggling unauthorized immigrants after his return from El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, which was reportedly described by a warden there as a “cemetery of the living dead.” Abrego Garcia has protested his innocence.

Abrego Garcia reportedly declined an offer to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for pleading guilty to human smuggling charges, but DHS said in a separate post on X they would process him for deportation to Uganda.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to carry out deportations of some immigrants, who lack legal authorization to live and work in the U.S., that are “known as “third-country removals.” The people subject to these orders are sent to countries not specifically identified in their removal orders or to countries with which they have no preexisting ties.

Jaime Contreras, 32BJ SEIU executive vice president and SEIU Latino Caucus chair, said in a statement, “Trump’s unrelenting and inhumane hunt to single out an individual and ignoring court decisions is not just un-constitutional but puts all Americans in danger.”

“Deporting Kilmar Garcia halfway around the world is a shameful and is a shocking picture for the entire world to see that damages our standing in the world even further,” Contreras said. “The bottom line is that Garcia deserves to be free.”

OSV News reached out to the Baltimore Archdiocese for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church instructs that the “more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin.” The Catholic Church’s teaching also makes clear human laws regulating migration are also subject to divine justice, but it has not yet issued official teaching exploring the morality of deportation beyond the magisterium of St. John Paul II.

The late pontiff’s 1993 encyclical “Veritatis Splendor” (“Splendor of Truth”) and 1995 encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” (“The Gospel of Life”) both quote the Second Vatican Council’s teaching in “Gaudium et Spes,” the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, naming “deportation” — without defining it — among various specific acts “offensive to human dignity” that “are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honor due to the Creator.”

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