A 4-year-old and a 7-year-old with U.S. citizenship were deported alongside their mother to Honduras last week, the family’s lawyer said, adding to the recent string of American citizens caught in the cross hairs of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The children and their mother were put on a flight to Honduras on Friday, the same day another child with U.S. citizenship, a 2-year-old girl, was sent to that country with her undocumented mother.
Lawyers for both families said the mothers were not given an option to leave their children in the United States before they were deported. In the case of the 2-year-old, whose 11-year-old sibling was also sent to Honduras, a federal judge in Louisiana expressed concern that the administration had deported the American child against the wishes of her father, who remained in the country.
But President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, denied that any American child was deported. Speaking about the 2-year-old’s case on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Mr. Homan said that federal immigration agents gave her mother a choice of whether to be deported with or without her child, and that she had left the country with her daughter at her discretion.
The children are from two different families who were living in Louisiana. The mother of the 2-year-old is pregnant, and the 4-year-old, a boy, has a rare form of late-stage cancer, the families’ lawyers said. They said the boy had no access to his medications or his doctors while he was in custody with his 7-year-old sister and mother.
The moves come as the Trump administration has ramped up its immigration enforcement and mass deportation efforts. In Florida last week, nearly 800 immigrants were arrested in an operation involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and state law enforcement officials.
Immigration advocates and the American Civil Liberties Union have condemned the administration’s actions, raising concerns of due process.
Gracie Willis, a lawyer with the National Immigration Project who is involved in the 2-year-old’s case, said, “What we saw from ICE over the last several days is horrifying and baffling,” referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But the administration has stood firm. “Having a U.S. citizen child after you enter this country illegally is not a get-out-of-jail free card,” Mr. Homan said.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said on Sunday that it was common for parents who face deportation to want to be removed with their children, noting that the mother of the 2-year-old had made that choice.
“We take our responsibility to protect children seriously and will continue to work with federal law enforcement to ensure that children are safe and protected,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
Both families were detained earlier last week during routine check-ins with ICE. They were in the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, a probationary program that allows people undergoing immigration proceedings to stay in the country.
The 2-year-old and her mother, along with an 11-year-old sibling who is not an American citizen, were detained April 22. The family with the 4-year-old and 7-year-old was detained Thursday morning, said Erin Hebert, their lawyer.
When they were detained, the families were taken hours away from New Orleans, the site of their appointments, their lawyers said, adding that they were prohibited from communicating with other family members or their lawyers. Lawyers for both families said that they were not able to reach the mothers until after they had arrived in Honduras.
Ms. Hebert said she had attended the appointment with the family she is representing, but the family was quickly taken into custody before she could speak with them. She said that she and her team plan to challenge the family’s deportation but are still evaluating their next steps.
In a brief order issued on Friday from Federal District Court in the Western District of Louisiana, Judge Terry A. Doughty asked why the administration had sent the 2-year-old — identified in court records only as V.M.L. — to Honduras with her mother even though her father had sought, through an emergency petition on Thursday, to stop her from being sent abroad.
Judge Doughty, a Trump appointee, said that he had a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process,” and set a hearing for May 16 to explore the issue.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Ms. Hebert said. “There is just no good-faith interpretation for what happened to these children.”
Alan Feuer, Minho Kim, Hamed Aleaziz and Brandon K. Thorp contributed reporting.
