A US judge on Sunday ordered an emergency halt to a plan by the Trump administration to deport a group of nearly 700 unaccompanied Guatemalan children back to their home country after immigrant advocates lawyers called the plan “illegal”.
Attorneys for 10 Guatemalan minors, ages 10 to 17, said in court papers filed late on Saturday that there were reports that planes were set to take off within hours for the Central American country. But a federal judge in Washington said those children couldn’t be deported for at least 14 days, and after a hastily scheduled hearing on Sunday, she enforced that they needed to be taken off the planes and back to the Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities while the legal process plays out.
Judge Sparkle L Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, began the Sunday afternoon hearing by ensuring that the justice department had received her expanded order and that government officials were aware of it. “I do not want there to be any ambiguity,” she said, adding that her ruling applies broadly to Guatemalan minors who arrived in the US without their parents or guardians.
Government lawyers, meanwhile, maintained that the children weren’t being deported but rather reunited at the request of their parents or guardians – a claim that the children’s lawyers dispute, at least in some cases.
“I have conflicting narratives from both sides here,” Sooknanan said. She said that what she was hearing from the government lawyers “doesn’t quite line up” with what the children’s advocates had told her.
Similar emergency requests were filed in other parts of the country as well. Attorneys in Arizona and Illinois asked federal judges there to block deportations of unaccompanied minors, underscoring how the fight over the government’s efforts has quickly spread.
At the border-area airport in Harlingen, Texas, the scene on Sunday morning was unmistakably active. Buses carrying migrants pulled on to the tarmac as clusters of federal agents moved quickly between the vehicles and waiting aircraft. Police cars circled the perimeter, and officers and security guards pushed reporters back from the chain-link fences that line the field. On the runway, planes sat with engines idling, ground crews making final preparations as if departures could come at any moment – all as the courtroom battle played out hundreds of miles away in Washington.
The Trump administration is planning to remove nearly 700 Guatemalan children who came to the US unaccompanied, according to a letter sent on Friday by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. The Guatemalan government has said it is ready to take them in.
Melissa Johnston, the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s program for unaccompanied children, sent an email to staff on Thursday calling for a halt to the release of all Guatemalan children except for those sponsored by parents or legal guardians in the US, according to a copy reviewed by Reuters and one of the former officials.
Lawyers for the Guatemalan children said the US government doesn’t have the authority to remove the children and is depriving them of due process by preventing them from pursuing asylum claims or immigration relief. Many have active cases in immigration courts, according to the attorneys’ court filing in Washington.
Although the children are supposed to be in the care and custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the government is “illegally transferring them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody to put them on flights to Guatemala, where they may face abuse, neglect, persecution, or torture”, argues the filing by attorneys with the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights and the National Immigration Law Center.
Migrant children traveling without their parents or guardians are handed over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement when they are encountered by officials along the US-Mexico border. Once in the US, the children often live in government-supervised shelters or with foster care families until they can be released to a sponsor – usually a family member – living in the country.
In a legal complaint filed on Sunday, the National Immigration Law Center and Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights said the deportations would be a “clear violation of the unambiguous protections that Congress has provided them as vulnerable children”.
“Defendants are imminently planning to illegally transfer Plaintiffs to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody to put them on flights to Guatemala, where they may face abuse, neglect, persecution, or even torture, against their best interests,” the complaint read.
The US Department of Homeland Security, Ice’s parent agency, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Guatemala’s foreign ministry declined to comment.
