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

The Trump administration says it intends to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the man who was wrongfully sent to El Salvador in March before being returned to the U.S. — to Uganda, a country with which he has no connection, in what experts describe as a costly, complex and legally questionable move.

A federal judge in Maryland has set a next hearing for Oct. 6 and blocked his deportation before then. In the meantime, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said Wednesday that he wants to seek asylum in the U.S. as part of a new claim based on a fear of persecution.

In a statement on Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem justified the administration’s targeting of Abrego Garcia by repeating allegations against him. “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,” Noem said.

Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, has denied the allegations. He has not been convicted of any crimes and has not been formally charged with being a gang member.

Abrego Garcia, who has a family in Maryland, returned to the U.S. in June, after spending several weeks in El Salvador’s notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo prison — known as CECOT. He was then immediately detained, after being indicted on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. Last week, he was released from pretrial detention but then was re-arrested by ICE agents on Monday in Baltimore.

U.S. officials said they would send Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica if he pleaded guilty and served any sentence in the U.S., but he declined the offer.

For now, he’s being held at a detention center in Virginia. But his ultimate fate remains unclear.

If the courts ultimately approve his removal, here is the process by which that might occur.

An escorted flight

Abrego Garcia would likely be placed on a chartered passenger plane or military transport, accompanied by ICE agents who are part of the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) unit, according to César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at the Ohio State University who studies immigration.

“He would be physically shackled — most likely at the ankles, sometimes also handcuffed — for the entire length of the flight, which could be many, many hours,” García Hernández says.

If Abrego Garcia is sent by passenger jet, it would be unusual if he were the only deportee on the flight, he says. “Most of the aircraft ICE uses are large passenger aircraft — Boeing 737s — and that’s why we typically do not see ICE deport one person at a time. These flights are simply too expensive.”

Jacqueline Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University, says that when people were deported to South Sudan, some were flown as far as Djibouti on a private jet, and then from Djibouti to South Sudan on a military plane. (However, those flights also faced legal challenges and may not be indicative of what happens on future flights.)

She says the optics of sending Abrego Garcia on his own wouldn’t be good, especially for an administration that has billed itself as using taxpayer money wisely. “That’s not going to be a good look” for ICE, she says.

Earlier this year, immigration officials admitted that deporting Abrego Garicia to El Salvador was due to an “administrative error.” It occurred in violation of an immigration judge ruling in 2019 that he was deportable, but not back to El Salvador, where he had a “well-founded fear” of gang persecution.

Uganda’s foreign ministry said last week that it reached a “temporary” agreement with the U.S. to accept deportees, saying it was meant for people “who may not be granted asylum in the United States but are reluctant to or may have concerns about returning to their countries of origin.”

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

NPR reached out to the Ugandan embassy and the Department of Homeland Security for specific information about how Abrego Garcia’s removal and transfer might occur. Ugandan officials did not immediately reply. DHS referred back to Noem’s original statement without providing details.

Although Abrego Garcia’s case is still being adjudicated, he wouldn’t be the first migrant to be deported to a third country in recent months. In July, the U.S. removed five migrants to Eswatini, a landlocked kingdom in Southern Africa formerly known as Swaziland. That 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 Salvadoran prison that housed Abrego Garcia.

Anwen Hughes, director of legal strategy for refugee programs at Human Rights First, says that it isn’t illegal for the U.S. to try to deport a person to a third country, but the law “requires them to run through a hierarchy of countries before deciding to send, for example, a Vietnamese person to South Sudan,” she says. “They do not seem to be operating that way.”

Hughes is part of a legal team that filed a motion for a class certification and a temporary restraining order in March challenging ICE’s policy on removing individuals to third countries without notice.

“It’s highly unusual for the United States to deport someone to a country to which they have no ties,” says García Hernández. “Almost always, deportations are to a person’s country of citizenship or prior residence.”

Handover upon landing in Uganda

Once the plane carrying Abrego Garcia and his ICE escorts lands in Uganda, the agents will likely hand over paperwork attesting to his identity, criminal history and medical records, according to García Hernández. “At that point, the U.S. is essentially done.”

From there, it would be up to Uganda to decide what to do, he says.

“Any claims of criminal activity are fair game for Ugandan officials,” he says, adding that “it’s a tough sell for a foreign government to welcome into their community someone the U.S. president and his Cabinet have repeatedly described as horrifically dangerous,” despite Abrego Garcia’s lack of criminal record.

It’s unclear what would happen to Abrego Garcia once in Uganda, says Nelson Kasfir, an emeritus professor of government at Dartmouth who studies Africa. “I do not think they would detain or harm him,” Kasfir says. “I also doubt they would promptly re-deport him, but that’s harder to say.”

Kristof Titeca, a professor at Antwerp University in Belgium who studies African governance, notes that it’s not the first time Uganda has hosted “failed asylum seekers” from other countries. In 2018, for example, it hosted Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers deported from Israel. In that instance, they were allowed to stay in a Kampala hotel for a few nights, “then left to their own devices,” he says. “Contrary to what they were promised, they also didn’t get a residence permit. Many of them decided to flee to Europe.”

Opposition figures in Uganda pushed back on the scheme, saying parliament in the largely authoritarian country had not been given a say in the agreement with the U.S. Details remain largely unknown about the deal brokered between President Yoweri Museveni — who is seeking to extend his nearly 40-year rule in next year’s elections — and the U.S.

“We don’t know the exact arrangement, the circumstances, who is being brought, how many are being brought,” Joel Ssenyonyi, the leader of opposition in parliament, told NPR. “If these are being considered misfits in the U.S., what makes them fit to be here in Uganda?”

García Hernández thinks that by sending Abrego Garcia to Uganda, “the Trump administration is trying to circumnavigate an immigration judge’s order barring deportation to El Salvador by triangulating — sending him to Uganda first.”

Sandoval-Moshenberg, a lawyer for Abrego Garcia, tells NPR that Uganda has given no assurances that his client can stay in that country and “not be quickly re-deported to his country of citizenship.”

Halima Athumani in Kampala, Uganda, contributed reporting.