In the wealthiest nation in the world, children are being torn from their home, sent to foreign countries without due process, and stripped of their rights and protection.
According to press reports and attorney statements, The Department of Homeland Security deported at least three U.S. citizen children, one of whom has cancer, along with their mothers and other siblings on Friday, April 25. A federal judge has ordered a hearing in the case of a least one of the children, a 2-year-old U.S. citizen whose father is seeking her return.
In what is becoming an all too familiar scenario, the child, known as VML, accompanied her mother and older sister to a routine check-in at an ICE office on April 22, and all three were immediately targeted for deportation. Before federal judge Terry Doughty could even review the request for a temporary restraining order, the mother and her daughters were on a plane to Honduras.
Doughty’s short order first makes it clear that U.S. citizens cannot be deported and are entitled to entry into the U.S. and free movement across the country. But his summary of the case, and his own efforts to get at the truth, are a brief but chilling indictment of the dangers faced by everyone in the U.S. when immigration enforcement is allowed to proceed unchecked:
The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her. But the Court doesn’t know that. Seeking the path of least resistance, the Court called counsel for the Government at 12:19 p.m. CST, so that we could speak with VML’s mother and survey her consent and custodial rights. The Court was independently aware at the time that the plane, tail number N570TA, was above the Gulf of America. The Court was then called back by counsel for the Government at 1:06 p.m. CST, informing the Court that a call with VML’s mother would not be possible, because she (and presumably VML) had just been released in Honduras. In the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process, IT IS ORDERED that the matter be set for hearing [citations omitted].
Notably, the judge did not order that VML and her family be returned to the United States, but it is imperative that the government do so immediately. This confluence of parental rights, potential custody disputes, immigration law, due process rights, and continued indifference to legal proceedings is a potent cocktail of everything wrong with immigration enforcement today.
DHS actors placed their agenda of stealth deportation above decency and the Constitution. At a minimum, they can bring this family and the other families with U.S. citizen children home to be able to challenge all aspects of their cases in court.
And that is at a minimum, because the legality of these stealth deportations has been challenged in numerous courts for numerous reasons. In many cases, people who were dutifully reporting for a routine ICE check-in—which meant they were on the government’s radar, had probably been in the country for many years and had some form of discretion to remain—and were not expecting to be placed in custody let alone deported without a word to families or attorneys. According to their attorneys, if they had a chance for a hearing they could have pursued relief from deportation.
Even if no relief was available, they deserved to be treated better.
Even the immigration system, as broken and dysfunctional as it is, contains these basic expectations of a day in court, a fair hearing and speedy redress when someone is wrongfully targeted for deportation.
Every single person facing the threat of deportation deserves to be treated with dignity, to have due process, to seek relief when available or to have the chance to leave the country, when necessary, with appropriate time to prepare.
But how can we even begin to talk about what a 2-year-old deserves from her government?
Let me try.
This little girl—and all U.S. citizen children of immigrant parents—deserves to be safe from deportation. She needs to know that the people around her love her and want to do what’s best for her. She needs to grow up in a country that wants her to thrive and succeed. She needs to believe that her family and everyone else will be able to count on the government to protect them from harm, and when necessary, to protect her from the government itself.
In this moment, that may seem like a tall order, but only if we stand by while abuses like this happen. Perhaps more to the point, even the immigration system, as broken and dysfunctional as it is, contains these basic expectations of a day in court, a fair hearing and speedy redress when someone is wrongfully targeted for deportation. Congress and the executive branch have chipped away at these fundamental rights—rights repeatedly recognized by the courts—by carving out exceptions to who gets a full hearing, authorizing accelerated processes based on when and how someone entered the country, and reducing the rights of asylum seekers and other immigrants.
But the Trump administration has taken these exceptions to a new extreme, relying on archaic laws to create a veneer of legality for deporting non-citizens en masse, ignoring the rights of those, like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who have permission to remain in the United States, snatching foreign students off the street and hiding them away or deporting them for protesting, and turning every knock at the door for immigrant families—regardless of their status—into a moment of terror.
They have already begun targeting unaccompanied immigrant children, so it is hardly surprising that U.S. citizen children of immigrants are the latest casualty in the unrelenting efforts to remake America in Trump’s image.
The government has the power to find and return these families. As a former DHS official, I know that deportation planes can be held, individuals can be taken off the manifest, and that officials can find and return people who have been wrongfully deported. It is not a question of resources, or logistics, or diplomatic niceties, or court orders. It’s a question of returning to the idea that immigration law is not a vehicle for expelling one’s enemies, but a set of laws that replicate the fundamental principles of dignity, justice and a fair day in court.
It’s all there, even in today’s immigration laws, even in these troubled times, if there is the integrity to follow through.
