Three U.S. citizen children were illegally removed from Louisiana and flown to Honduras on Friday, their attorneys say, in a story that has swiftly caught national attention.
Legal counsel for the two Louisiana families tells Rolling Stone that both mothers say they were not given the option of keeping their U.S. citizen children in the country. They say the mothers were told their children were being deported alongside them, despite their citizenship status and even though both families had lawful custodians willing to take custody of the children.
Over the weekend, after news of the deportations caused outrage across the country, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, went on television to defend the removals by insisting the mothers chose to take their children with them. Rubio called the story “misleading,” saying: “Three U.S. citizens ages four, seven, and two were not deported. Their mothers, who are illegally in this country, were deported. The children went with their mothers.”
Homan went as far to say the kids couldn’t have been deported because deportations are ordered by an immigration judge.
Meanwhile, attorneys for the families say their clients were not afforded any kind of due process, nor were they given access to lawyers, a hearing, or even phone calls. This is despite multiple legal motions being filed to try and delay the deportations until a judge could hear their cases.
Erin Hebert, a senior associate at the Ware Immigration law firm in the New Orleans area, is representing the mother of the seven-year-old girl and the four-year-old boy, the latter of whom is in active treatment for metastatic cancer. (The boy is the second U.S. citizen child with cancer that Trump has deported so far in his second term.) Over the weekend, Hebert was in contact with the mother, who is now in Honduras with her two kids. The children’s father remains in the U.S.
“She was told she was being deported with her children and she asked, ‘Why my children?’” says Hebert. “They refused to answer her. They gave her no options, no ability to make arrangements. She never signed anything. She never gave them permission. She never indicated that she wanted them to come with her.”
On Thursday morning, the mother reported to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices for what she thought was a standard check-in. In less than 24 hours, she and her two children were on a plane to Honduras.
“We were immediately working on arranging for alternate custody so that those kids would not get removed with [their] mother once they were all detained,” says Hebert. She says ICE had known prior to the check-in that the four-year-old was in active treatment for cancer. They removed him from the country without his medication and without consulting with his doctors.
Hebert is part of a group of legal experts and advocates that sprung together to try to make sure the two families weren’t deported. Among that group is also Gracie Willis from the National Immigration Project of National Lawyers Guild. Willis represented the two-year-old U.S. citizen child of the pregnant mother who was deported, who is known in court papers as V.M.L.
Both Hebert and Willis attempted to file legal motions to at least temporarily stop the families from being deported, but they were unable to confer with their clients until after they’d arrived in Honduras.
“What has become entirely clear is that ICE’s portrayal of consent is undeniably false and flatly a lie,” alleges Willis. “ICE did not provide the mothers with any alternative other than their U.S. citizen children coming with them. They were not provided a choice. They were not provided options.”
Willis explains that ICE presented a note they claim V.M.L’s mother handwrote. In Spanish it reads, “I will take my daughter with me to Honduras.” Willis says the letter seems to have been written on a hotel notepad, with parts blacked out to hide the name and location of the hotel.
“It’s not an expression of want, it’s not an expression of wish, it’s not an expression of desire,” says Willis. “It is an expression of a fact that she was told by ICE.”
Mich Gonzalez, who works at Sanctuary of the South, is one of the attorneys for V.M.L’s mother. “Both mothers have clearly communicated that they felt under extreme duress in this situation, that ICE essentially coerced them into accepting this deportation with their children,” says Gonzalez. “Both have stated that ICE repeatedly denied their requests, for a phone call, for a legal process, requests to speak to a judge, request to speak to anyone via phone call, including family members or potentially lawyers.”
In both cases, the fathers involved stayed in the U.S. “The fathers are distraught by this cruel separation from their families,” says Gonzalez.
On Sunday, Rubio went on Meet the Press and suggested several times that the two mothers chose to take their U.S. citizen children with them when they were deported.
“Those children are U.S. citizens. They can come back into the United States if there’s their father or someone here who wants to assume them,” Rubio said. “Ultimately, who was deported was their mothers, who were here illegally. The children just went with their mothers. But it wasn’t like — you guys make it sound like ICE agents kicked down the door and grabbed the two-year-old and threw him on an airplane. That’s misleading.” (The two-year-old child who was deported is a girl.)
Rubio asserted that if a parent is being deported, they have two options: Take their child or leave the child behind. “The parents make that choice,” he claimed, adding that, otherwise, journalists would be printing headlines like: “U.S. Holding Hostage Two-Year-Old, Four-Year-Old, Seven-Year-Old, While Mother Deported.”
Willis disagrees, responding, “Secretary Rubio is repeating the same lies from ICE, never having spoken to these families.”
Gonzalez adds, “All three children had the legal right to stay here, with people ready and willing, with the legal right to receive them. And none of them were provided that opportunity by ICE.”
Homan went on Face the Nation and repeated Rubio’s claim that the mothers chose to take their children with them. “No U.S. citizen child was deported,” said Homan. “Deported means ordered by an immigration judge.”
A federal judge in Louisiana has issued a brief order asking why the Trump administration sent two-year-old V.M.L to Honduras when her father had tried to stop his daughter from being deported.
“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” wrote Judge Terry Doughty. “But the court doesn’t know that.”
Doughty set a hearing for May 16, saying he had a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process” and affirming that it is “illegal and unconstitutional to deport” a U.S. citizen.
