Despite being American citizens, three U.S.-born children, ages 2, 4, and 7, were deported to Honduras with their mothers early Friday morning, April 25.
According to the family’s lawyer, the 4-year-old, who has Stage 4 cancer, was deported without access to medication or contact with their doctor.
The children, who are from two different families, were detained during a routine immigration check-in in New Orleans on Thursday. They were then transported over 200 miles to Alexandria, Louisiana, and then flown to Honduras.
According to the lawyer, they were not given the opportunity to contact legal representatives before being deported, and an ICE officer cut off a phone call to the 2-year-old’s father after only one minute.
Trump administration officials, including Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, claim that the children were deported because their non-citizen mothers wanted to return to Honduras with them.
“It is common that parents want to be removed with their children,” McLaughlin told the Post.
However, on Thursday, lawyers for the 2-year-old’s father filed an emergency petition in the Western District of Louisiana seeking her release. The girl was flown to Honduras the next morning, before the court opened.
Hours later, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee, issued an order expressing concern that the girl had been deported against her father’s wishes. He wrote that without a court appearance, there was no way to have an official record of the family’s desire to send the child to Honduras.
Doughty scheduled a hearing for May 16 to investigate his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
Grace Willis, a lawyer for the 2-year-old’s father, agreed, saying, “We have absolutely no idea whether [the mothers] ever actually did give consent for their children to come with them or if they did, under what kind of duress and what other options were presented to them.”
Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, lamented the lack of due process in the hasty deportations.
“I don’t know how much more of a blatant or clear constitutional violation there can be than deporting U.S. citizens without due process,” she said in a Post interview. “Especially with some of those citizens being the most vulnerable of all vulnerable, children, and not just any children, children with medical conditions that are dire.”
This news follows Gothamist’s report on migrant children in New York being forced to attend immigration court hearings without a lawyer.
On March 21, the Trump administration terminated a $18 million contract that provided attorneys and “friends of the court” to migrant children in New York state.
Following the funding cutoff, Sierra Kraft, executive director of the ICARE Coalition, reported that 50-60% of children, some as young as four years old, now appear without a lawyer on any given docket, up from 30-40% previously.
Data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse shows that 96% of individuals who appear in New York state immigration courts without a lawyer are deported. That figure is only 23% for those who appear with a lawyer.
