Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who was arrested again this week as officials sought to deport him for a second time, has asked a judge to grant him asylum, his lawyers said on Wednesday. The move opens up a new legal avenue for him to remain in the United States.

The revelation that Mr. Abrego Garcia was seeking asylum came during a hearing in Federal District Court in Maryland on a separate legal challenge that his lawyers filed on Monday: an attempt to stop the administration from deporting him again — this time to Uganda.

The asylum request, submitted to a Maryland immigration judge, added to the increasingly complex web of cases that Mr. Abrego Garcia has found himself involved in since March, when the Trump administration deported him in error to a notorious terrorism prison in El Salvador, his homeland. That removal, officials eventually acknowledged, violated a court ruling issued in 2019 and known as a withholding of removal order that had expressly barred him from being sent to the country where he feared his life could be in danger.

When Mr. Abrego Garcia obtained the withholding of removal order, he had also applied for asylum. But while the immigration judge who considered his application found it to be “credible,” he pointed out that Mr. Abrego Garcia had not filed for asylum within a year of arriving in the United States as required under the law.

Even as he fights re-deportation, Mr. Abrego Garcia and his lawyers have also been fending off criminal charges brought against him in Federal District Court in Nashville. Those charges, filed in June in coordination with his return from El Salvador, accuse him of having taken part in a conspiracy to smuggle undocumented immigrants across the United States from 2016 until this year.

At the hearing in Maryland, Judge Paula Xinis, who has been handling Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation cases, told the government that it could not send him anywhere outside of the United States for at least the next few months. Judge Xinis said that she would hold a hearing on Oct. 6 to determine whether he might face danger, even torture, if he is expelled to Uganda, adding that she plans to issue a decision no more than 30 days later.

Since his arrest on Monday, Mr. Abrego Garcia has been held in an immigration detention center in Virginia and his lawyers said that they had no plans to ask for his release at least until the hearing was held in October. Judge Xinis ordered the administration to keep him locked up within 200 miles of her courtroom as his new legal challenge moves forward.

His asylum request could take months to be resolved.