Kilmar Abrego Garcia transferred to Pennsylvania immigrant detention center
Abrego Garcia’s case gained international attention after he was deported to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, only to be returned to the U.S. in June.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the Maryland man wrongfully deported to El Salvador who became an early flash point over President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown — has been transferred to Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Western Pennsylvania.
Spokespersons for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security could not immediately be reached for comment. However, ICE detainee records showed the 30-year-old in custody Saturday at the privately run detention center in Philipsburg.
Abrego Garcia’s case gained international attention after he was deported to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, only to be returned to the U.S. in June. He now faces criminal charges and a renewed deportation attempt from the White House while his attorneys attempt to plead his case for political asylum.
The Trump administration has claimed that Abrego Garcia, who was born in El Salvador, is a member of the MS-13 gang. But his March deportation ran counter to a judge’s 2019 order that prohibited him from being deported to his native country, due to fears of persecution from which the government was “unable or unwilling to protect him.”
After his return to the U.S. this summer, he was indicted on human smuggling charges in Tennessee, where authorities alleged he brought people into the U.S. in 2022 who were not legally allowed to be in the country. Immigration officials detained Abrego Garcia after his release from a local jail, and he faces another possible deportation to a third country.
» READ MORE: Inside Pa.’s largest immigrant detention center: Violence, desperation, little oversight
Abrego Garcia was held at a detention center in Virginia prior to his transfer to Moshannon. His attorneys, in court records cited by NBC News, expressed concerns about the Clearfield County holding facility. They described conditions at the facility as “deeply concerning,” citing a suicide that occurred at the facility last month as well as reports of substandard medical care.
Moshannon Valley Processing Center, run by the Florida-based private prisons giant GEO Group, was the subject of a recent Inquirer report. In interviews, current and former detainees described grim and crowded conditions, with 75 men sleeping together in a pod, sharing six toilets and three showers among them. Independent oversight of the facility has been virtually eliminated in recent months, even as the inmate population has reached historic highs.
The Shut Down Detention Campaign, a coalition of immigrant-rights groups, plans to protest outside Moshannon on Monday to demand Abrego Garcia’s release, saying that the facility has a “a long record of abuse and neglect since [it] first opened in 2021.”
In a statement Saturday, the coalition called his case an “an international example of the cruelty of our broken immigration system.”
Transferring detainees between various federal prisons and privately run immigrant detention centers has become more routine since Trump took office, according to immigration attorneys, often with little explanation for the moves.
Abrego Garcia’s petition before the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland is ongoing. It remains unclear how long he will stay in Moshannon.
The Trump administration recently sought to deport him to Uganda amid a fraught debate over which countries could guarantee his safety. Attorneys for the Salvadoran father accused the administration of using the high-profile case for political gain at the expense of due process for Abrego Garcia.
ICE officials notified attorneys in early September that they would seek to deport Abrego Garcia to another African nation — Eswatini.