SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
By Rachel Nostrant
A four-year-old and a seven-year-old with US citizenship were deported alongside their mother to Honduras last week, the family’s lawyer said, adding to the recent string of American citizens caught in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The children and their mother were put on a flight to Honduras on Friday (Saturday AEST), the same day another child with US citizenship, a two-year-old girl, was sent to that country with her mother, who lacked legal status.
Lawyers for both families said the mothers were not given an option to leave their children in the United States before they were deported. In the case of the two-year-old, whose 11-year-old sibling was also sent to Honduras, a federal judge in Louisiana expressed concern that the administration had deported the American child against the wishes of her father, who remained in the country.
Border tsar Tom Homan said having a child after entering the US illegally was not a “get-out-of-jail-free card”.Credit: Bloomberg
But US President Donald Trump’s border tsar, Tom Homan, denied that any American child was deported. Speaking about the two-year-old’s case on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, Homan said federal immigration agents gave her mother a choice of whether to be deported with or without her child, and that she had left the country with her daughter at her discretion.
The children are from two different families who were living in Louisiana. The mother of the two-year-old is pregnant. The four-year-old, a boy, had a rare form of late-stage cancer, the family’s lawyers said. They said the boy had no access to his medications or his doctors while he was in custody with his seven-year-old sister and mother.
The moves come as the Trump administration has ramped up its immigration enforcement and mass deportation efforts. In Florida last week, nearly 800 immigrants were arrested in an operation involving US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and state law enforcement officials.
Immigration advocates and the American Civil Liberties Union have condemned the administration’s actions, raising concerns about due process.
Gracie Willis, a lawyer with the National Immigration Project who is involved in the two-year-old’s case, said, “What we saw from ICE over the last several days is horrifying and baffling.”
But the administration has stood firm. “Having a US citizen child after you enter this country illegally is not a get-out-of-jail free card,” Homan said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said on Sunday that it was common for parents who faced deportation to want to be removed with their children, noting that the mother of the two-year-old had made that choice.
Nearly 800 immigrants were arrested in an operation involving US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Florida last week. Credit: AP
“We take our responsibility to protect children seriously and will continue to work with federal law enforcement to ensure that children are safe and protected,” McLaughlin said.
Both families were detained last week during routine check-ins with ICE. They were in the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, a probationary program that allows people undergoing immigration proceedings to stay in the country.
The two-year-old and her mother, along with an 11-year-old sibling who is not an American citizen, were detained on April 22. The family with the four- and 7-year-old was detained on Thursday morning, their lawyer, Erin Hebert, said.
When they were detained, the families were taken hours away from New Orleans, the site of their appointments, their lawyers said, adding that they were prohibited from communicating with other family members or their lawyers. Lawyers for both families said they were not able to reach the mothers until after they had arrived in Honduras.
Hebert said she had attended the appointment with the family she was representing, but the family was quickly taken into custody before she could speak with them. She and her team planned to challenge the family’s deportation but were still evaluating their next steps, she said.
In a brief order issued on Friday from US District Court in the Western District of Louisiana, Judge Terry Doughty asked why the administration had sent the two-year-old – identified in court records only as V.M.L. – to Honduras with her mother even though her father had sought, through an emergency petition on Thursday, to stop her from being sent abroad.
Doughty, a Trump appointee, said he had a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process”, and set a hearing for May 16 to explore the issue.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Hebert said. “There is just no good-faith interpretation for what happened to these children.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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