Kilmar Ábrego García’s fate hangs in limbo after his lawyers fought for his release on Thursday while the government argued their right to remove the Maryland man to the West African country of Liberia.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said she would come to a decision “as quickly as I can.” When Xinis kicked off the hearing on Thursday, she said she expected it would be the final one in the months-long case filed by Ábrego García’s lawyers to free him from immigration detention.

She is weighing whether to dissolve a preliminary injunction keeping Ábrego García in the country and allow the Department of Homeland Security to remove Ábrego García to Liberia. Ábrego García’s lawyers also proposed that she give the government an ultimatum to provide a constitutional reason for their client’s removal, and if it’s not provided, allow for his release. It’s unclear when she will give her ruling.

Xinis repeatedly asked lawyers to point her to the final order of removal for Ábrego García, which she said she has never seen filed and no one during the hearing could prove existed. If it doesn’t exist, she said it could warrant Ábrego García’s immediate release or the government could issue a new order of removal, restarting some of the third-country removal process.

Lawyers on both sides argued whether Ábrego García’s full due process rights as a noncitizen had been fulfilled, whether Xinis had jurisdiction to rule on the case and whether the government had made a good-faith effort to find a proper third country for Ábrego García’s deportation where he would not be refouled to his home country of El Salvador.

The court documents filed the week leading up to the evidentiary hearing laid out each side’s arguments.

Ábrego García’s lawyers said, as they have in previous hearings, that they would not object if the government chose to send their client to Costa Rica.

In a declaration, John Cantú, acting assistant director for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, said Costa Rica — which had agreed in August to accept Ábrego García and grant him legal status — was no longer an option.

But in his testimony on Thursday, Cantú admitted he had no direct knowledge of the conversations with Costa Rica. Cantú, who came into his current role at ERO on Nov. 3, said his testimony is based on a five-minute Teams call he had with a lawyer from the U.S. State Department. He used much of the language sent to him in an email from that lawyer in his declaration, much of which he said he didn’t understand when questioned about it.

Xinis has repeatedly expressed frustration with the government’s lawyers for not preparing their witnesses for court. In Thursday’s hearing, she called the document an “empty word salad of an affidavit” without any additional evidence.

“Poor Mr. Cantú knew nothing about anything,” Xinis said, adding that there was little evidence to assume Costa Rica had backed out. “He didn’t know the meaning of the words in his own affidavit, that is extremely troubling.”

The government’s lawyers argued that the third-country selection is at the discretion of Homeland Security. They said the U.S. State Department only needs to secure diplomatic assurances that the person who is being removed will not be persecuted, tortured or refouled to their home country.

Liberia had said it would take Ábrego García on a temporary basis, which they argued is typical language of a third-country removal process. The government’s lawyers assured that Liberia would not send Ábrego García to El Salvador.

The hearing is the latest twist in an eight-month legal battle between President Donald Trump’s administration and Ábrego García, a Salvadoran national and Beltsville resident. Ábrego García came into the national spotlight when he was deported in March to El Salvador, despite a 2019 court order that said he could not be deported there due to threats of persecution.

Xinis ordered in April that the U.S. government return Ábrego García, but when he returned in June, Ábrego García was charged in Tennessee with felony smuggling. Xinis has overseen his latest case in Maryland, where his lawyers have been pushing for his release from immigration detention.

Meanwhile, Ábrego García’s criminal case continues to play out in Tennessee. In early December, two evidentiary hearings will be held to test whether the government had vindictive motives in prosecuting him for felony smuggling charges when he was returned to the United States this summer.