Three young children who are US citizens – including one with cancer – were deported to Honduras alongside their mothers last week, according to advocacy groups and the families’ lawyers.
One of the children is a four-year-old with Stage 4 cancer who was sent without medication, a lawyer for the child’s family said.
Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said the mothers had made the choice for their citizen children to be removed with them. “Having a US citizen child does not make you immune from our laws,” he said, adding the mothers were in the US illegally.
Trump faced a backlash during his first term for a policy that separated thousands of children from their parents.
On Friday, New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials deported the two mothers and three children aged two, four, and seven, to Honduras from Louisiana, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a statement.
The two families – including one pregnant mother – had lived in the US for years and were “deported from the U.S. under deeply troubling circumstances that raise serious due process concerns”, the ACLU said.
One of the US citizen children who was removed was suffering from metastatic cancer and was deported without the ability to consult with doctors, the advocacy group alleged.
Speaking to reporters at a news conference on Monday morning, Homan said deporting families together was better than separating them.
“We’re keeping families together,” he said. “What we did was remove children with their mothers who requested the children depart with them. There’s a parental decision.”
Homan dismissed the use of the word “deported” to describe the removal of the children from the country.
“They weren’t deported. We don’t deport US citizens. Their parents made that decision, not the United States government,” he said.
Last week, a federal judge said he had a “strong suspicion” that one of the children deported to Honduras, a two-year-old citizen, – was sent away with “no meaningful process”.
The Louisiana-born child and her family members were apprehended during a routine appointment at a New Orleans immigration office on 22 April, according to court documents.
Homan, in an interview with CBS Face the Nation on Sunday, said “the judge was due process”, adding that the two-year-old’s mother “had due process at great taxpayer expense and was ordered by an immigration judge after those hearings, so she had due process.”
A hearing has been scheduled in the case for 19 May for the government to address whether the family was given due process.
The second family was detained on 24 April, when ICE refused to respond to their attorneys’ and family members’ requests to contact them, the ACLU said.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday touted the administration’s immigration enforcement actions during its first 100 days.
Leavitt said Trump would sign two new executive orders as a part of his crackdown on immigration, including one that directs officials to publish a list of places that administration has identified as “sanctuary cities”.
The term “sanctuary city” has been popular in the US for more than a decade to describe places that limit their assistance to federal immigration authorities. As it is not a legal term, cities have taken different approaches, some establishing policies in law and others simply changing policing practices.
Leavitt also touted an immigration raid at an “underground” nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Sunday, where she said officials detained more than 100 undocumented immigrants and seized weapons and drugs.
The Drug Enforcement Administration wrote in a post on X that 114 immigrants were arrested and placed “on buses for processing and likely eventual deportation”.
Thousands of undocumented immigrants have been detained since Donald Trump returned to the White House on 20 January.
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