GREENBELT, Md. (AP) — A hearing for Kilmar Ábrego Garcia which was expected to determine whether the man mistakenly sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador would be deported to Liberia was abruptly canceled Tuesday for reasons that were not immediately clear.
The government is moving to vacate a preliminary injunction put in place by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis preventing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from detaining and deporting
Ábrego Garcia to the West African country of Liberia. His legal team is seeking to make the injunction permanent. The judge left previous orders in place last December and ordered him released from custody.
Abrego Garcia was in the courtroom Tuesday but Judge Xinis never took the bench. Instead attorneys for both sides left the courtroom about five minutes before the hearing was supposed to begin. They held a 15-minute conference and then the hearing was canceled. No announcement was made in court as to why the hearing was canceled.
The Salvadoran national’s case became a focal point in the immigration debate after he was mistakenly deported to his home country last year. Since his return, he has been fighting a second deportation to an African country as proposed by Department of Homeland Security officials.
Ábrego Garcia argued that if he were to be deported, it should be to Costa Rica, which had previously agreed to accept him. But Todd Lyons, the former acting director of ICE, said in a March 2026 memo that deporting Ábrego Garcia to Costa Rica would be “prejudicial to the United States," because the U.S. had expended resources and political capital negotiating with Liberia to accept third-country nationals.
The push for deportation to Liberia continued even after the U.S. signed an agreement with Costa Rica to accept deportees who cannot legally be returned to their home countries.
“The government is leading the same rodeo as many times before. Sending Kilmar to Costa Rica is on the table. However, the government continues to punish him for pursuing his constitutional rights and seeks to ship him to Liberia," said Jossie Flor Sapunar, the national communications director for We Are CASA, an activist group that has supported Ábrego Garcia and his family and intends to be at the courthouse. “Kilmar has become an international symbol of due process, a symbol which the Trump administration wants to silence.”
Supporters of Abrego Garcia gathered outside the courthouse in the Washington, D.C., suburbs Tuesday, some wearing green vests that said “CASA."
Nadine Seiler, 61, held a banner supporting Ábrego Garcia while a choir sang “We Shall Not be Moved.” Seiler said she immigrated from Trinidad nearly 39 years ago.
“I’m an immigrant. I have come to represent for my immigrant community," said Seiler. She said Abrego Garcia said months ago that he was willing to leave the country, but the government hasn't agreed. “It’s not about policy. It’s about cruelty.”
She added in an email that the family deserves privacy, either at home in Maryland or in Costa Rica.
Ábrego Garcia, 31, has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the U.S. illegally as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge ruled that he could not be deported to El Salvador because he faced danger there from a gang that had threatened his family.
He was arrested in Baltimore in March 2025 after picking up his then-5-year-old son, who has autism and other disabilities, from his grandmother’s house, according to court papers.
Ábrego Garcia was then sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador known as CECOT, which activists say is rife with abuses and where inmates are packed into cells and never allowed outside. ICE officials admitted in court filings that his deportation there was an “administrative error.”
Facing public pressure and a court order, President Donald Trump's Republican administration brought him back in June 2025, but only after securing an indictment charging him with human smuggling in Tennessee. A federal judge dismissed that case in May 2026, finding that the Justice Department’s pursuit of criminal charges was designed to punish Ábrego Garcia for challenging his deportation. The government is appealing.
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Santana reported from Washington.
