A two-year-old U.S. citizen appears to have been deported to Honduras with her mother with “no meaningful process” as her father was pushing for the courts to allow her to stay in the country, according to a federal judge.
At least two other U.S. citizen children — ages four and seven — were also removed from the country in a pair of cases that have raised deeply troubling questions about Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, lawyers say.
The four-year-old child has stage 4 cancer and was removed from the country without medication or the ability to reach family doctors, lawyers said.
According to attorneys, families were taken into custody during routine check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in New Orleans this week. They were then sent to a detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, roughly three hours away, with blocked from speaking with their families and legal teams before they were placed on flights to Honduras.
Trump-appointed District Judge Terry Doughty said the two-year-old child was released in Honduras on Friday along with her mother and sister, who were born in the country.
Hours after the deportation, Doughty issued an order stressing it is “illegal and unconstitutional” to deport U.S. citizens.
“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” he wrote. “But the court doesn’t know that.”
The child, identified in court filings as V.M.L., had been detained along with her mother by immigration officials earlier this week.
Doughty scheduled a hearing for May 16. He said it was “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
According to the child’s redacted birth certificate filed in court documents, she was born in New Orleans in 2023. She had been with her mother and sister at an immigration check-in on Tuesday, when they were detained and processed for removal.
In court, Trump administration officials said the mother told them she wanted to bring the child with her to Honduras. The filing included a handwritten note in Spanish that officials claimed was written by the mother, confirming her wish.
The judge, however, said he had wanted to verify that.
“The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” Doughty said. “But the Court doesn’t know that.”
“ICE’s actions show a blatant violation of due process and basic human rights,” according to a statement from Teresa Reyes-Flores of Southeast Dignity Not Detention Coalition.
Gracie Willis of the National Immigration Project called ICE’s actions “horrifying and baffling.”
“We should be gravely concerned that ICE has been given tacit approval to both detain and deport U.S. citizen children despite the availability and willingness of U.S.-based caregivers who, only because of ICE’s own actions, cannot find or contact them,” she added.
On Thursday, attorneys for the family filed an emergency petition in federal court in Louisiana. They’re seeking the release of the child from ICE custody and a declaration that her detention had been conducted outside the bounds of the law.
The emergency petition was filed under Trish Mack, with the attorneys indicating that the child’s father had asked Mack to act as the custodian and take her home from ICE custody.
Lawyers for the guardian told the court that V.M.L.’s father has been attempting to contact the child’s mother, but ICE officials blocked him from having a substantive phone call.
He claimed that ICE officials only allowed them to speak for about one minute on Tuesday, when the mother was in custody, and that they were unable to make a decision about their child.
Since V.M.L. is a U.S. citizen, she will likely be able to return to the United States. Doughty said he attempted to get the mother on the phone on Friday to find out if it was accurate that she wanted to bring the child with her to Honduras. The judge noted that he was “independently aware” that the plane he thought was flying the family south was “above the Gulf of America,” adopting Trump’s new name for the Gulf of Mexico.
Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, said in a statement that “the government has used deceptive tactics to deny people their rights.”
Doughty wrote that attorneys from the Trump administration said on Friday afternoon that it wouldn’t be possible to get the mother on the phone “because she (and presumably V.M.L) had just been released in Honduras.”
It was at that point that Doughty scheduled the hearing for next month.
“These deplorable actions demonstrate ICE's increasing willingness to violate all protections for immigrants as well as those of their children,” Homero López, Jr. of Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, said in a statement. “These types of disappearances are reminiscent of the darkest eras in our country's history and put everyone, regardless of immigration status, at risk.”
“A government agency that sequesters and deports vulnerable mothers with their US citizen children without due process must be defunded, not rewarded with an additional 45 billion dollars to continue at taxpayers’ expense,” said Mich Gonzalez of Sanctuary of the South.
