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Let It Burn!
Three U.S. citizen children from two different families were deported with their mothers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the early hours of Friday morning. One of them is a 4-year-old with Stage 4 cancer who was deported without medication or the ability to contact their doctors, the family’s lawyer said.
According to their lawyers, both families were taken into custody while attending routine check-ins this week in New Orleans as part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which allows individuals to remain in their communities while undergoing immigration proceedings. Lawyers say the families were taken to Alexandria, Louisiana, a three-hour drive from New Orleans, where they were prevented from communicating with their family members and legal representatives and then put on a flight to Honduras.
The cases have renewed concerns that the Trump administration’s expedited deportations are violating the due process rights of both citizens and noncitizens.
“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,” said Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana. “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.
The U.S. government has never released data on how many U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained or deported by ICE. But independent investigations have revealed that ICE has arrested, detained, deported and issued detainers — requests to local jails to hold a person in custody — for thousands of citizens since the agency’s creation in 2003.
Lawyers representing the father of the 2-year-old U.S. citizen who was deported, identified as V.M.L. in court documents, filed an emergency petition in the Western District of Louisiana on Thursday seeking her release. The child was put on a plane to Honduras the next morning before the court opened.
Hours after the deportation, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee, issued an order expressing his concern that the girl had been deported against her father’s wishes while stressing it is “illegal and unconstitutional” to deport U.S. citizens.
“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” wrote Doughty, who has been lauded for his conservative rulings in the past. “But the court doesn’t know that.”
Doughty set a May 16 court hearing to investigate his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.” The order did not call for the girl’s return or recommend any recourse for the family.
According to court filings, the girl had accompanied her mother and 11-year-old sister to the immigration appointment in New Orleans on Tuesday morning. About an hour later, her father, who had driven the family into New Orleans for the meeting, received a call informing him that the family had been taken into custody. That night, the girl’s father was allowed to speak with her mother for only a minute before an ICE agent ended the call, lawyers contend. Lawyers say the man did not get the chance to speak to his partner or child again until after they were released in Honduras.
“Both of these mothers were held without the ability to speak with their co-parents and the guardians of their children while making this incredibly personal and difficult assessment about what was best for their children,” said Gracie Willis, the lawyer for V.M.L.’s father.
Justice Department lawyers argued that “the man claiming to be V.M.L.'s father” had failed to prove his identity to the government despite requests that he present himself to ICE agents, adding that he had also “demonstrated considerable hesitation” regarding the inquiries into his immigration status. The man’s lawyers included V.M.L.’s birth certificate in their fillings, which shows she was born in Baton Rouge and lists the names of both her mother and father.
The government is not disputing the immigration status of any of the three children. Instead, officials contend that the undocumented mothers opted to take their citizen children with them back to Honduras. In their court filing, Justice Department lawyers attached a note they say was written by V.M.L.’s mother saying that she was taking the child with her to Honduras.
“It is common that parents want to be removed with their children,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told The Washington Post.
Willis says ICE’s refusal to allow the women to talk to their lawyers meant there was no way to verify whether that was true in these cases.
“We have absolutely no idea whether they 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,” Willis said.
