A Trump-appointed federal judge on Thursday shredded the administration’s flimsy excuse for trying to secretly deport children over Labor Day weekend.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly wrote that the government’s claim that it had yanked children out of their beds to hastily reunite them with their parents in Guatemala had “crumbled like a house of cards.”
“There is no evidence before the Court that the parents of these children sought their return,” Kelly wrote in a 43-page filing. “To the contrary, the Guatemalan Attorney General reports that officials could not even track down parents for most of the children whom Defendants found eligible for their ‘reunification’ plan. And none of those that were located had asked for their children to come back to Guatemala.”
The judge excoriated the Trump administration’s defense for the children’s expedited removal, saying the government had “come up short on both the law and facts,” and “misstate[d] the legal standard” in trying to undermine the commonality requirement for a class action lawsuit.
“In any event, the record here is barren of evidence that any child in the proposed class wants to return to Guatemala, even if their parents can be found. All the evidence suggests the opposite: Plaintiffs have offered over 30 declarations from Guatemalan children who object to being sent back,” Kelly wrote.
Earlier this month, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller claimed that a judge who’d initially blocked the children’s deportation was “effectively kidnapping these migrant children and refusing to let them return home to their parents in their home country.”
Kelly also slammed the Trump administration’s claim that they would not deport children deemed ineligible for removal, “given the possibility that Defendants may alter their criteria and then act in a way that would prevent judicial review, the risk of irremediable harm.”
“They cite no statute, regulation, or even policy statement requiring them.That means there is no legal roadblock preventing Defendants from changing the criteria (or how they interpret them) tomorrow, placing a currently non-eligible child onto the eligibility list, and hustling that child out of the country as they tried to do over Labor Day weekend,” Kelly wrote.
He added that the government’s conduct plainly suggested the administration was “not applying their criteria accurately, consistently, or in ways that reflect good faith,” because it had attempted to rush the children out in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend leaving little opportunity for legal intervention.
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