A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting 10 Guatemalan children back to their home country, and scheduled an emergency hearing on Sunday to determine whether the deportations were legal.
Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, issued the order after the National Immigration Law Center filed an emergency request in federal court to stop the deportations. The lawyers argued that the government had violated the children’s right to due process and had ignored special protections for minors who cross the border alone.
The court forbade the administration from deporting the children, who are between the ages of 10 and 16, for 14 days. An emergency hearing was scheduled for Sunday afternoon.
The order could temporarily hamstring the federal government’s attempts to send back hundreds of other unaccompanied minors whom it said had entered the country illegally from Guatemala.
While the ruling was temporary, it marked the second setback for President Trump’s immigration policies since Friday, when another judge blocked the administration from carrying out rapid deportations far from the border, a cornerstone of the White House’s immigration policy.
The lawsuit was filed after staff members at shelters holding the children were notified by email that they should prepare some children to be sent back to Guatemala. Lawyers representing some of the children received a similar email.
In its 25-page complaint, the National Immigration Law Center said that the children had active cases before immigration courts across the country, and that their repatriation would violate the law and Constitution. It called the government’s actions “unlawful and reckless.”
Some of the children, identified in the lawsuit only by their initials, have expressed a fear of returning to Guatemala to judges in immigration courts where they have pending cases.
The number of unaccompanied minors entering the United States has plummeted since Mr. Trump took office for his second term this year. But the migrant children have posed a particular challenge to the Trump administration because they are entitled to special protections.
Hundreds of thousands of children, mainly from Central America, have crossed the southern border into the United States in the last decade, often seeking to join friends or family members. Many of the minors have won the right to remain in the United States permanently by proving that they were abandoned or persecuted in their home countries.
The move to repatriate the Guatemalan children has the backing of the Guatemalan government. On Friday, Guatemala’s minister of foreign affairs, Carlos Ramíro Martínez, said that his country had been coordinating with the United States and expected to receive more than 600 minors, following a plan outlined by Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, on a recent visit to Guatemala.
Mr. Martínez stressed that his country hoped that the returns would be carried out “in a gradual and planned manner.”
Most of the children whom the government intends to remove from the United States have been living in government shelters, where they remain until they are released to sponsors or guardians.
Lawyers fighting the removal of unaccompanied minors have cited the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which provides unique protections for unaccompanied minors seeking refuge in the United States, including the opportunity to have their cases adjudicated by a court.
Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States.
Ali Watkins covers international news for The Times and is based in Belfast.
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