The Trump administration may not be telling the truth on deporting undocumented immigrant mothers with their U.S. citizen children.
Attorneys for the women and three U.S.-born children say their deportations over the weekend were illegal, and the administration’s claims that the children were placed on deportation flights at their mothers’ request are false. One mother wasn’t allowed to speak with a lawyer or her family before she was deported with her children, even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement knew that one of them has Stage 4 cancer.
That child, a four-year-old boy, left the country without access to his cancer medication along with his 7-year-old sister, also a U.S. citizen. Their mother “did not consent to any of this,” according to attorney Mich P. González.
“She did not sign anything, did not write anything and did not consent to anything expressly. The entire time she was trying very aggressively to speak to her lawyer,” González told NBC News. “As a matter of fact, she was trying to get ahold of a phone to try to call her family and her attorney. But she wasn’t being allowed.”
In another case, a mother of a two-year-old American citizen about to be deported was given less than two minutes on the phone with her husband to decide what to do with their child. She had been told by ICE to take her children to her routine check-in, moved up from the original date, when she was detained.
Her attorney told MSNBC that “at every single point ICE denied anybody the ability to know where this family was, denied everybody the ability to contact with them and communicate with them.”
The child’s father “barely had any opportunity to speak with the mother about what was best for the child before an ICE officer hung up the phone as he tried to give her the number for an attorney,” said Grace Willis, an attorney with the National Immigration Project.
The Trump administration’s “border czar” Tom Homan has said that the deportations of these young children all took place at their mother’s request. Secretary of State Marco Rubio concurs, saying that the kids weren’t deported, but “went back with their mothers,” and can return to the U.S. if there’s someone who “wants to assume them.”
All of this is more proof of the White House’s cruel and haphazard approach to immigration. It wants quick, mass deportations so badly that it ignores the law and even basic allowances for family contact and phone calls. To these officials, basic human rights, let alone those guaranteed under the Constitution, do not apply to anyone slated for deportation, lest anything get slowed down or overturned.
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