The Trump administration has deported a two-year-old US citizen “with no meaningful process”, according to a federal judge, while in a different case the authorities deported the mother of a one-year-old girl, separating them indefinitely.
Lawyers in the two cases, the first in Louisiana and the second in Florida, say their clients were arrested at routine check-ins at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) offices and were given virtually no opportunity to speak with them or family members.
They are the latest examples of the White House cracking down on documented immigrants, including green card holders and also even citizens who have the status by birth or naturalization. The unorthodox policy and the frequent avoidance of due process has brought about a clash with the judicial branch of the US government in a battle over the constitution.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), National Immigration Project and several other allied groups said in a statement that deporting children who are US citizens, as in these two cases, are a “shocking – although increasingly common – abuse of power”.
US district judge Terry Doughty in Monroe, Louisiana, said the two-year-old girl, who was referred to as VML in court documents, was deported with her mother to Honduras.
“It is illegal and unconstitutional to deport, detain for deportation, or recommend deportation of a US citizen,” said the judge.
He scheduled a hearing for 19 May “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process”.
VML was apprehended by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) on Tuesday with her mother, Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela, and older sister when Villela attended a routine appointment at its New Orleans office, according to a filing by Trish Mack, who said the child’s father asked her to act as the child’s custodian. The girl’s father is seeking to have her returned to the United States.
Immigrants of all sorts with cases in process, pending appeals or parole, have routinely been required to regularly check in with Ice officers, sometimes for many years. And so long as they had not violated any regulations or committed any crimes, they were usually sent on their way. Now, as the Trump administration pushes for the mass arrest and deportation of immigrants, check-ins have become increasingly fraught.
According to Mack, when VML’s father briefly spoke to Villela, he could hear her and the children crying. According to a court document, he reminded her that a US citizen “could not be deported”.
However, prosecutors said Villela, who has legal custody, told Ice that she wanted to retain custody of the girl and take her to Honduras. They said the man claiming to be VML’s father had not presented himself to Ice despite requests to do so.
VML is not prohibited from entering the US, federal prosecutors said..
She was among two families deported from Louisiana, also including one pregnant woman, the advocacy groups noted.
The Department of Homeland Security and the justice department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“These actions stand in direct violation of Ice’s own written and informal directives, which mandate coordination for the care of minor children with willing caretakers – regardless of immigration status – when deportations are being carried out,” the ACLU said.
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In Florida, meanwhile, a Cuban-born woman who is the mother of a one-year-old girl and the wife of a US citizen was detained at a scheduled check-in with Ice in Tampa, her lawyer said on Saturday.
Heidy Sánchez was held without any communication and flown to Cuba two days later. She is still breastfeeding her daughter, who suffers from seizures, her lawyer, Claudia Cañizares, said.
Cañizares said she tried to file paperwork with Ice to contest the deportation on Thursday morning but Ice refused to accept it, saying Sánchez was already gone. Sánchez is not a criminal and has a strong case on humanitarian grounds for staying in the US, Cañizares said.
Donald Trump, whose presidential campaigns have focused heavily on immigration, said earlier this month he wanted to deport some violent criminals who are US citizens to El Salvadoran prisons, where he removed hundreds of Venezuelans and some Salvadorans last month without even a court hearing. He sent them to a brutal prison for suspected gangsters and terrorists, claiming they were all violent criminals when it has since been argued that most were not and even if they were they had the right to due process.
The comments from Trump about sending US citizens or what he termed “home grown” criminals to another country to be incarcerated have alarmed civil rights advocates and is viewed by many legal scholars as unconstitutional.
The US supreme court has ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Maryland resident Kilmar Ábrego García, who was sent to the country on 15 March with hundreds of others despite a US court order protecting him from deportation.
Opinion polls in the last week show Trump struggling for approval with voters who were surveyed, including on some of his hardline anti-immigration tactics.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting
