Two immigration incidents that sparked controversy over the weekend have left at least one judge to examine whether the Trump administration properly deported mothers who exited the country with their young children in tow.
The cases, including one brought in federal court in Louisiana, involve deportations of a woman and her 2-year-old daughter and another woman and her children, who are 4 and 7 years old, to Honduras.
Attorneys for the families allege that the children, all of whom are U.S. citizens, were wrongly deported, but the Trump administration maintains that the mothers chose to bring their children along and that the U.S. citizen minors, therefore, were not technically deported at the behest of the government.
The American Civil Liberties Union said that in both instances, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials held the two families incommunicado and did not allow them to respond to “multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them” before they were removed from the country.
“As a result, the families were completely isolated during critical moments when decisions were being made about the welfare of their minor children,” the attorneys said.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, attempted to put to rest the notion that the government was illegally deporting U.S. citizen children, including one with serious medical needs.
“The mothers made that choice, and I tell you what, if we didn’t do it, the story today would be ‘Trump administration separating families again,’” Homan said during a press briefing honoring Trump’s first 100 days in office.
Mother and two-year-old deported to Honduras
ICE officials apprehended a woman named Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela and her two daughters, including the 2-year-old, while they were appearing for a routine government check-in on April 22, according to attorneys for the family.
That evening, ICE officials contacted Lopez Villela’s partner, Adiel Mendez Sagastume, who is the father of the 2-year-old, and he was able to speak to Lopez Villela for about a minute, the attorneys said. The toddler is identified in the lawsuit as V.M.L.
“V.M.L.’s father began to give V.M.L.’s mother the phone number for their attorneys, but before he could, he heard the ICE officer take the phone from her and hang up the call,” the attorneys said.
Department of Justice attorneys responded to the court, describing Sagastume as a man “who claims to be” the toddler’s father and said he was skittish about his immigration status when authorities asked for his identification. The DOJ attorneys said Lopez Villela was scheduled to be deported on April 25 to Honduras and that she drafted a brief note, which they included in the court filings, in which she declared that she “wants to retain custody” of her daughter.
The family’s attorneys argued that the note, which was in Spanish, did not translate to that.
“That is emphatically NOT what the note says. The note states factually that V.M.L.’s mother ‘is bringing’ V.M.L. with her. This is not a statement of intent, hope, desire, or assessment of what is best of V.M.L.,” the attorneys said.
Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee who has ruled in favor of Republicans in prominent cases, did not rush to issue a temporary restraining order when the attorneys requested it, but he set a hearing for May 16 to review the matter.
Doughty also scolded the Trump administration, saying in a scheduling order that the court made an innocuous attempt to contact the government so that it could hear directly from Lopez Villela about her intentions and that the government said it was not possible.
“The Court was independently aware at the time that the plane, tail number N570TA, was above the Gulf of America. The Court was then called back by counsel for the Government at 1:06 p.m. CST, informing the Court that a call with VML’s mother would not be possible, because she (and presumably VML) had just been released in Honduras,” Doughty wrote, adding that he set the forthcoming hearing “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
Mother with sick 4-year-old deported to Honduras
While there are less public details about this case, the ACLU and a lawyer with the National Immigration Project have said ICE egregiously mishandled the removal of another mother and her two children who are 4 and 7.
The 4-year-old “suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer was deported without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians–despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs,” the ACLU said in a statement.
As in the case of the 2-year-old, the mother and her two children appeared for a routine check-in with the government last week in Louisiana when they were taken into custody and deported soon thereafter.
“The kids were ready for school. They were expecting to go to school later that day,” National Immigration Project lawyer Gracie Willis said in a video interview.
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She said an attorney, Erin Hebert, attempted to file an administrative stay with ICE on the family’s behalf, citing the 4-year-old’s ongoing cancer treatment in the United States, and that ICE did not respond to the lawyer.
“My clients were deported within 24 hours of being detained with no access to me,” Hebert told CNN.
The stay would have put a brief hold on the family’s deportation. It is unclear at this stage whether their case has made it into the federal court system and what recourse, if any, they could see if the children were in fact wrongly deported.