Less than three weeks after Kilmar Abrego Garcia was brought back from a wrongful deportation to El Salvador to face criminal charges in the United States, the Trump administration indicated Thursday that it planned to deport him again — this time to a different country.

Jonathan Guynn, a Justice Department lawyer, acknowledged to a judge that there were “no imminent plans” to remove Abrego Garcia. Still, the assertion that the administration intends to redeport a man who was just returned to the country after being indicted raised questions about the charges the Justice Department filed against him.

It was a surprising development when Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on June 6 that officials were bringing Abrego Garcia back to the United States after weeks of insisting that the Trump administration was powerless to comply with a series of court orders — including one from the Supreme Court — to “facilitate” his release from Salvadoran custody.

The administration’s stated reason for doing so was equally surprising: so that Abrego Garcia could stand trial, Bondi said, on serious charges of taking part in a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle immigrants without permanent legal status across the United States.

Guynn’s admission that the administration intends to expel Abrego Garcia, who is from El Salvador, to a third country raised the possibility that he could be deported before going on trial. His remarks came as the judges overseeing his separate criminal and civil deportation cases struggled to figure out what the government planned to do with him.