Three American-Born Children Have Been Sent To Honduras With Their Mothers
Legal representatives for the families argue the mothers were denied options for their citizen children to remain in the country.
Fulfilling a pledge made on the campaign trail, the Trump administration has made hasty, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants a hallmark of the president’s first 100 days in office.
On Monday, Border Czar Tom Homan claimed the U.S. has carried out 139,000 deportations since January 20. Critics have decried a lack of due process leading to egregious mistakes, such as the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a Maryland man who had previously been given protected immigration status. Now, the Louisiana ACLU claims three children — all American citizens — have been deported to Honduras with their mothers. Homan has denied this categorization of events.
On April 25, two families — a mother, her non-citizen 11 year old and American-born 2 year old (Family 1); and another mother and her American-born 4 and 7 year olds (Family 2) — were sent to Honduras by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in New Orleans. The ACLU claims the families, detained just days prior, were held without being able to speak to family members or attorneys.
As such, they did not have counsel regarding the rights of their American-born children. According to reporting by CBS, Family 1 was in the process of trying to keep the children in the country by transferring custody temporarily to their American-citizen aunt. But the deportations took place early in the morning, before immigration courts were open and before either women could speak to a lawyer.
Homan said, in an interview on Face the Nation, that the mother of the 2-year-old chose to bring her child with her to Honduras.
“The 2-year-old went with the mom,” he said. “The mom signed the paper, saying ‘I want my 2-year-old to go with me.’ That's a parent's decision, it's not a government decision.”
But a federal judge has already scheduled a hearing, writing there is a “strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
The situation is perhaps particularly dire for one of the children in Family 2, whom the ACLU says is suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer. The organization claims the child was deported “without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians — despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs.”
“ICE’s actions today go far past the typical inhumanity of their detention operations in Louisiana,” says Fatima Khan, Louisiana Organization for Refugees and Immigrants (LORI) in a statement. “They ignored their own protocols on legal access and protecting children’s rights to enact an expedient deportation they know to be unlawful. Not only that, they disappeared these families before any U.S. Court could stand up for its children. We should all be mortified.”
Birthright citizenship is granted to anyone born to a U.S. citizen (barring a few exceptions), known as “jus sanguinis”, or born within a U.S. territory (“jus soli”) and has been a constitutional right under the 14th Amendment since 1868. Under jus soli, a parent’s immigration status does not matter: generally speaking, if you’re born in the U.S. you are automatically an American citizen.
This has been a point of contention for President Trump, who attempted to revoke birthright citizenship to those born to undocumented parents in the United States via executive order on his first day in office. To date, every court to consider this order has blocked it, but the Supreme Court has agreed to hear oral arguments in favor of Trump’s order on May 15.
