A federal judge has ordered a hearing to determine whether the Trump administration deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen with “no meaningful process.”
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty set the date of May 16 to resolve the matter of the New Orleans-born child, who he said appears to be in Honduras with her mother.
The issue, as Politico reported Friday, stemmed from the deportation of the child’s Honduras-born mother. Trump administration officials claimed in court that the woman had told Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials that she wanted to bring her 2-year-old with her. They offered a handwritten letter in Spanish purportedly from the mother saying as much.
“The government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” Doughty wrote. “But the Court doesn’t know that.”
Also a factor is how the child’s father had been asking the courts to allow her to stay in the U.S. Family lawyers filed an emergency petition Thursday in the Western District of Louisiana demanding her release. The petition said that ICE officials denied the father an appropriate amount of time to speak to the mother over the phone about their child—only about one minute on Tuesday.
Doughty, a Trump appointee, said he tried to get to the bottom of things Friday by seeking to talk to the mother on the phone. But government lawyers replied that it wouldn’t be possible since she was in Honduras.
Therefore, Doughty set next month’s hearing “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
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