A 2-year-old American girl has been left stateless after the Trump administration deported her alongside her family.
Emanuelly Borges Santos, known to her family as Manu, was born in a Florida hospital in 2022. She has an American passport and a Social Security card. Nevertheless, Manu and her parents, who are both undocumented, were packed onto a plane with 94 others and shipped to Brazil in February, according to a report from The Washington Post.
When they arrived, Brazilian officials were shocked to find the American toddler among the deportees.
“We’d never seen another case like this,” federal police officer Alexsandra Oliveira Medeiros Reis told the Post.
Manu is currently living in Brazil on a tourist visa as the government tries to resolve the bureaucratic predicament of the girl’s citizenship. In the meantime, she’s living with no right to healthcare or schooling in Brazil. Her visa is set to expire within weeks.
Manu doesn’t qualify for the standard paths to citizenship in the country, so the country is trying to create a new one: “temporary” citizenship that would expire when she turns 18.
In the meantime, her parents are left to worry. “What if we need to take her to the doctor?” Elioni Gonçalves, her mother, lamented to the Post.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told the Daily Beast that, in a situation like Manu’s, parents are given a choice about what happens to their children.
“The media and Democrat politicians are force-feeding the public false information that U.S. citizen children are being deported,” said DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin. “This is false and irresponsible. Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] will place the children with someone the parent designates.”
However, Manu’s parents say they were not given a choice. “They simply deported us,” said her father, Edivan Borges dos Santos.
It is not the first time that American kids have been caught up in President Donald Trump’s second-term push to deport undocumented immigrants en masse.
Last month, three U.S. citizens—ages 2,4, and 7—were sent to Honduras with their undocumented parents. One of the kids had cancer and was shipped away without medication.
Trump’s Justice Department is currently awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of his day-one executive order ending birthright citizenship. If the court rules in his favor, it would make it all the easier for the government to deport children like Manu.
Manu’s parents told the Post that they sought asylum in the United States in 2021 after fleeing violence and corruption in Brazil. While the courts in Florida considered their case, Borges took a construction job, and the family settled into a quiet American life.
While a judge had stayed their deportation after Manu’s birth in December 2022, the family was called into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. They were made to sign forms they did not understand and were swiftly deported.
The family’s lawyer was incensed after learning what had happened, telling the Post anonymously, “The U.S. government is deporting their own citizen.”
Manu lives a relatively isolated life in Poté, a rural town not far from Brazil’s coast, spending most days with her mother and grandparents. “She sees other kids very rarely,” her mother said.
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