The removal of three children with U.S. citizenship with their families to Honduras last week has prompted alarm that President Trump’s strict immigration enforcement may have crossed “illegal and unconstitutional” lines, as a federal judge in one of the cases put it.
Lawyers for the two families involved said the mothers were not given an option to leave their children in the United States before they were deported. But Mr. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said the mothers requested the children’s removal.
The cases have added to growing concerns that the Trump administration may be violating the Constitution in its increasingly stringent crackdown on immigration, including removing U.S. citizens, a desire that Mr. Trump has expressed in the past but that legal experts say runs against longstanding prohibitions.
Here is a look at the cases and what is at stake.
What happened?
Three children who are U.S. citizens were removed to Honduras last week as part of the deportation of other members of their families.
Two of the children, ages 4 and 7, belong to one Honduran family. The mother of those children had an outstanding deportation order and had shown up to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in on Thursday, said Gracie Willis, the raids response coordinator with the National Immigration Project, who is helping the family’s immigration lawyer with the case.
The 4-year-old, Ms. Willis said, has cancer. The mother had shown up to the check-in with a lawyer but was quickly thrust into the deportation process. Her lawyer had no meaningful chance to try to stop the deportation in court, Ms. Willis said.
The mother wanted both children to remain in the United States, she said.
Two days before, a mother with a 2-year-old who is a citizen was put in a similar situation. The mother also had an outstanding deportation order and had been going to ICE check-ins for years, Ms. Willis said. This time, however, she was detained with the 2-year-old and an older child, not given access to her lawyers and was deported with the children, according to Ms. Willis.
She also wanted her 2-year-old to remain in the United States, Ms. Willis said. The girl’s father had sought in an emergency petition on Thursday to stop the girl from being sent abroad, said the judge in the case, Terry A. Doughty of the Federal District Court in the Western District of Louisiana, who said he had a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
Both families were deported to Honduras on Friday, Ms. Willis said.
What are the rules around the removal of U.S. citizens?
U.S. citizens cannot be deported, a point reiterated by Judge Doughty, who set up a hearing for next month to investigate whether the 2-year-old’s removal was “illegal and unconstitutional.”
Still, removals of U.S. citizens have sometimes happened by accident. Deborah Fleischaker, a former senior official at ICE during the Biden administration, said that removals of children who are U.S. citizens, along with their parents, had occurred in the past. U.S. citizen children can travel with their parent being deported, if the parent approves it, she said.
“It’s always happened, but discretion is key,” she said. “Why did these folks have to go now? Why could they not have taken more time to review and consider custody issues, medical issues?”
What are the families’ lawyers saying?
Immigration lawyers representing the families are livid and pointing to the deportation as troubling.
“What we saw from ICE over the last several days is horrifying and baffling. Families have been ripped apart unnecessarily,” Ms. Willis said in a statement over the weekend. “These mothers had no opportunity to speak with their co-parents to make the kinds of choices that parents are entitled to make for their children, the kinds of decisions that millions of parents make every day: ‘What is best for our child?’”
What is the administration saying?
On Monday, Mr. Homan said the mothers in both cases had requested that their children be removed with them.
“The mothers made that choice,” he said. Mr. Homan said that if they had not sent the children with the mothers, the administration would have been criticized for separating families.
ICE officials have also balked at the framing of the story publicly.
“Children have returned with their parents during every administration,” Mellissa Harper, the head of the ICE office that oversaw the deportations of the families, said on a LinkedIn post discussing the matter. “Each of these family cases was reviewed individually.”
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
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