We’re Deporting US Citizens, Including Children
Apparently, this is who we are now.
POLITICO (“Judge says 2-year-old US citizen appears to have been deported with ‘no meaningful process’“):
A federal judge is raising alarms that the Trump administration deported a two-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras with “no meaningful process,” even as the child’s father was frantically petitioning the courts to keep her in the country.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said the child — identified in court papers by the initials “V.M.L.” — appeared to have been released in Honduras earlier Friday, along with her Honduran-born mother and sister, who had been detained by immigration officials earlier in the week.
The judge on Friday scheduled a hearing for May 16, which he said was “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
[…]
Doughty’s sharp criticism of the Trump administration is particularly notable because he issued a series of major decisions in favor of Trump and his allies in recent years, most notably backing conservatives in legal challenges to the Biden administration’s efforts to rein in what it claimed was misinformation on social media platforms about vaccines and certain politically charged topics.
Indeed, some conservatives considered Doughty so likely to be in their camp that they filed lawsuits in his judicial division in order to have a strong chance the cases would be assigned to him.
Even as Doughty made clear that he was disturbed by the government’s actions, in his order Friday the judge seemed to tip his hat to the president, adopting the term “Gulf of America” for the body of water traditionally known as the Gulf of Mexico.
The child, whose redacted U.S. birth certificate was filed in court and showed she was born in New Orleans in 2023, had been with her mother and sister during a regular immigration check-in at the New Orleans office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Tuesday. Officials there detained them and queued them up for deportation.
Trump administration officials said in court that the mother told ICE officials that she wished to take V.M.L. with her to Honduras. The filing included a handwritten note in Spanish they claimed was written by the mother and confirmed her intent. But the judge said he had hoped to verify that information.
“The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” Doughty wrote. “But the Court doesn’t know that.”
Indeed. Many Facebook friends have asked variations of the question, “Why do people who came here illegally deserve due process?” And my answer is always: so that we can verify that they are here illegally.
Yes, that’s inconvenient if your goal is to rapidly deport tens of thousands of people. But it’s the American way. Indeed, I believe we even wrote it down somewhere.
Obviously, I have no specific knowledge of the VML case. Presumably, the mother’s deportation was lawful and it’s more than plausible that she wanted to take her child with her rather than leaving her behind. But the father also has rights, and the matter should have been adjudicated.
The ACLU (“ICE Deports 3 U.S. Citizen Children Held Incommunicado Prior to the Deportation“) contends this is not an isolated case.
Today, in the early hours of the morning, the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office deported at least two families, including two mothers and their minor children – three of whom are U.S. citizen children aged 2, 4, and 7. One of the mothers is currently pregnant. The families, who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities, were deported from the U.S. under deeply troubling circumstances that raise serious due process concerns.
ICE detained the first family on Tuesday, April 22, and the second family on Thursday, April 24. In both cases, ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.
[…]
Both families have possible immigration relief, but because ICE denied them access to their attorneys, legal counsel was unable to assist and advise them in time. With one family, government attorneys had assured legal counsel that a legal call would be arranged within 24-48 hours, as well as a call with a family member. Instead, just after close of business and after courts closed for the day, ICE suddenly reversed course and informed counsel that the family would be deported at 6am the next morning–before the court reopened.
That family filed a habeas corpus petition and motion for a temporary restraining order, which was never ruled on because of their rapid early-morning deportation.
In the case of the other family, a U.S. citizen child suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer 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. In addition, one of the mothers who was deported is pregnant, and ICE proceeded with her deportation without ensuring any continuity of prenatal care or medical oversight.
The ACLU is an advocacy group and has incentives to present the extreme version of facts to gain public attention. But the account is not only plausible but inevitable. The very nature of a massive sweep of this nature, rushed to avoid judicial intervention, virtually guarantees that citizens and other legal residents will be caught in the net.
Indeed, the ACLU has been challenging the nature of our deportation policy for quite some time—going back at least as far as the Obama administration. A December 2014 commentary (“The Ones Obama Left Behind – And Deported Without a Chance to Be Heard“) notes,
Each year, over 363, 279 – 83 percent – of deportations from the United States are ordered by immigration officers, not judges. Those deported in “summary removal” processes do not get a hearing or a chance to present evidence, or call a lawyer, or even say goodbye to their families before they are banished, sometimes for life. Our report released today, American Exile: Rapid Deportations That Bypass the Courtroom, shows the incredible costs to those we remove and to their families left behind when the rush to deport trumps due process.
Two weeks ago, President Obama announced a plan that has the potential to protect more than four million non-citizens leading rooted lives in the United States without legal recognition. By announcing his executive action, President Obama helped millions of deserving undocumented residents, but failed to reform treatment of people caught at our border. Our border is not a line but, as understood by the Department of Homeland Security, a 100-mile ring into the United States. And yet this space is treated completely differently, even for people with the exact same equities as those apprehended in the so-called “interior.”
As we found in a year-long investigation and close to 200 interviews and case studies, many people arrested and deported in the border zone are not strangers at the gate: They include longtime residents and parents of U.S. citizens. Others are lawful residents or workers, deported during their daily commute when federal immigration law enforcement officers summarily extinguish their rights. And then there are children and families fleeing unfathomable violence and seeking protection in the United States. Deporting these individuals without a fair hearing and sometimes with catastrophic – if predictable – consequences violates our human rights obligations and defies who we want to be as a country.
Announcing his executive action program, President Obama said, “We didn’t raise the Statue of Liberty with her back to the world; we did it with her light shining as a beacon to the world.” But when asylum seekers reach our borders following that beacon, they and many others are deported quickly to danger, without a hearing, often after signing deportation forms they don’t understand and in a language they don’t speak.
In all of these situations, people are deported because immigration enforcement officers have incredible power and discretion that is used too often as a smokescreen to deny a person his or her rights. Immigration enforcement officers are not trained as lawyers; nor do they act as independent mediators. They are trained to arrest, detain, and deport – not to judge and authorize relief or to be fluent in some of the most complicated law in the United States.
Indeed, the aforementioned Facebook friends point to this as evidence that criticisms of current policy is just Trump Derangement Syndrome. But, regardless of whether the longstanding policy of rapidly deporting those caught at or near the border was valid, it’s radically different than rounding up people who are living inside the country.
As noted before, they are putting adult US citizens in detention for long periods when they didnt have their ID with them. Better remember to carry your papers with you comrade!
Steve
@James, you need a better group of facebook friends.
The felon will likley pardon the architects of this policy, so perhaps a future administration will turn the perps over to the ICC. At least there, they would receive due process.
@Sleeping Dog: Mostly folks I went to high school with in Alabama or served with in the Army 30-odd years ago. It’s useful exposure outside the bubble.
“Why do people who came here illegally deserve due process?”
Because the Fifth Amendment guaranties that right to all persons. Not just to citizens, or any other subset of persons.
@Moosebreath: I often say that we require military personnel (and government workers generally) to take an oath to the Constitution, but we don’t make them read it first. Americans have a pretty vague understanding of their system of government.
I don’t know if your friends are disingenuous or just naive. The immigration system is so f’ed up it’s nearly impossible to come here legally. The owner of my local pub is from Ecuador. It took him 10 years and $45,000 to get his family here. Most people in S America don’t have those kind of resources. Then consider that Biden provided funding for 375 immigration judge teams and an additional 1,470 attorneys and support staff to help process cases as part of a $14B funding request from Congress. You know where that request went in a MAGA-run House. And now Trump has fired many of the judges that did exist.
So the answer to your friends is that immigrants are being denied due process both coming AND going.
I’m old enough to remember Republican leaders like Reagan, Bush 43, John McCain and others talking about genuine immigration reform. But Republicans have been replaced by MAGA and new leaders who need to sell an enemy that is “poisoning the blood of our country” in the same way it was done in Germany in the 30’s.
@James Joyner: I grew up in southwest Missouri so I’ve got lots of Facebook friends from high school just like that. I visited so many of the links they posted that the Facebook algorithm identified me as very conservative. I used to like hearing what they said to, as you say, give me exposure outside the bubble but as they’ve gotten meaner and more impervious to facts it’s just gotten depressing.
The $trump administration is deporting little kids with cancer.
Little kids with cancer.
Makes me wish there was a hell because maga would surely burn in it.
I don’t know if the guy that I remember sitting across the bar from me several years ago who said: “When I joined the Air Force I took an oath to support the United States Constitution, not Ronald Reagan” had read the entire document. However I think that he had an idea of what it meant.
James Joyner:
I didn’t vote for this, nor work elections for this, nor serve my country and community for this, nor pay many taxes for this. And neither did my family and ancestors.
@Mister Bluster: Somebody has to quote the Onion headline from fifteen years ago, “Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be”.
@Moosebreath:
Indeed.
They may as well ask: why should criminals receive dues process? Why should someone accused of fraud or who instigated an insurrection receive due process?
@James Joyner: On that topic, I have always wondered how slavery survived the Fifth Amendment.
But then I suppose “Due Process” is vague enough to interpret however we wish.
@Kathy:
The cynical, but accurate, line is that the system afforded Trump all the due process he could afford. Which turned out to be enough to keep him out of jail until his elevation to a position protected not only by John Robert’s immunity, but also by the absurd 1973 OLC opinion that a prez can do as much criming as he wants and DOJ won’t bother him.
@Tony W: Slavery and the slave trade were specifically protected in the document itself. Chattel isn’t entitled to due process.
@Daryl: I’m old enough to remember those days, too. We didn’t want “real” immigration reform then, and we still don’t. Over half of the voters in the last election specifically rejected the only real alternative to what’s happening. This is who “We the people” are. It’s not who you are, or who I am (though I know several people who would disagree–and may be right), or who others we know are, but it is who “we” are in aggregate. It may well be who we’ve always been given our history of 14th, 15th, and 16th Amendments == sharecropping, poll taxes and literacy texts, and de jure Jim Crow.
@Tony W:
Because although “all men are created equal” [emphasis added] was aspirational, it was only aspirational; human chattel property was designated as only 3/5 th of a citizen and only to pad the populations of slave holder states. (And the argument that blacks weren’t actually human to begin with had already established some currency in our society.)
Does this qualify as “…something really bad?” Or are we still waiting “…for something really bad” before we can denounce this Administration without being accused of an overreaction?
I predicted, on this very site, that this administration would be deporting US Citizens and was accused of overreacting and being overly dramatic. To each of you who wrote any version of that to me, Fuck You.
They are either facts or they are not facts, there are not extreme and less extreme versions of a fact.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: It was considerably worse than that. Slaves were 0/5 citizens. The 3/5 Compromise was about how they would be accounted for in terms of taxation and representation in the House. It would have seemed absurd to the framers that they had any rights as individuals.
@Neil Hudelson: I would never rely on any advocate’s, including the US Justice Department’s, telling of a side of a case as the whole truth.
@James Joyner:
Understand
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I mean, I know the arguments, I just remain amazed they held any currency.
And I know I’m making that statement during the 2nd Trump Administration, so touche
@James Joyner: Thank you. I’ve been using this linguistic configuration for several years now, wondering when someone would drop the other shoe.
@Tony W: Not only held, still do. Americans are no less human than any other cultural/societal cohort willing to trample others in pursuit of its goals.
@just nutha:
Balloon Juice quoted Tim Walz,
@James Joyner: Sure. As always, we should not rely only on one individual or group’s telling of their side of a case.
We should consider the source, and also consider that the best legal counsel available to many of these people are the non-profits, notably the ACLU. And the ACLU is going to choose to pursue cases that reflect the organization’s view of civil liberties and constitutional rights.
It’s reasonable to question the credibility of any organization including the ACLU, but they have famously supported organizations not popular among progressives in their advocacy of rights, such as advocating on behalf of Illinois Nazis in the 1970’s and the NRA just last year. A bit different than advocating for profit, or on behalf of an administration’s openly stated political objectives.
We need state AGs to start filing charges against the individual ICE agents committing these acts. They will probably weasel out under qualified immunity, but it will make the most disgusting acts the face of this administration.
Expelling a US Citizen Toddler with cancer who has a citizen parent seems like a pretty sympathetic case for prosecution. Bonus points if there is a violation of the Supreme Court’s order.
“Just following orders” needs to be dangerous. And outside of a federal pardon.
@Gustopher: This. Until the criminals committing these acts start getting punished for them, they will continue “without let or hindrance.”
@Roger: Hey Roger, what part of SW MO? I grew up in Miller, west of Springfield. I have the same experience with HS friends and have cut off a number of the worst, but hate unfriending family…