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.
