President Trump has fallen into a parent trap.
The same people who years ago accused him of “family separations” for deporting parents without their children in tow are now lambasting him for sending the children with their parents.
The criticism poured in over the last week as a 2-year-old U.S. citizen was sent to Honduras with her mother, an illegal immigrant who told immigration authorities she wanted to bring her daughter with her. Immigration advocates said another, a 4-year-old child with Stage 4 cancer, was also sent to Honduras with their mother, but without their medication.
“Let this sink in: our government is deporting American kids, including kids with cancer,” said Vanessa Cardenas, executive director of America’s Voice, who said the decisions reek of “cruelty.”
White House border czar Tom Homan, though, said the decision belonged to the parents, not the Trump administration.
“What we did is remove children with their mothers who requested the children depart with them,” Mr. Homan said Monday. “The mothers made that choice. And I tell you what, if we didn’t do it, the story today would be Trump administration separating families again.”
That was a reference back to 2018, when Mr. Trump’s zero-tolerance policy for illegal immigrant families led to migrant parents being jailed, and their children taken from them and placed in the migrant child foster care system.
The problem was that there was no plan in place to reunite the kids, so when the parents were deported, the kids stayed. Federal judges stepped in with forceful rulings ordering an end to it all, saying parents had to be given an informed choice.
Now, however, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty has said even that may not be good enough.
He rebuked the government last week, explaining his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
Government lawyers said the girl’s mother, Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela, said she wanted to take her daughter, Valentina Mendez Lopez, to Honduras when she was deported. She wrote a note on Thursday memorializing that decision, which the government submitted to Judge Doughty.
He said he couldn’t rely on that.
As the plane was in flight over the Gulf of America, he tried to arrange a call with the mother to figure out what was going on. By the time the government got an answer back to the judge, the woman — and presumably the child — had already been released in Honduras.
The judge said it is illegal to deport a U.S. citizen.
One major difference between 2018 and now is that the children then were newly arrived citizens of other countries, making them illegal immigrants.
The children in question now are U.S. citizens, born to illegal immigrants living here in some cases for years.
Mr. Trump has moved to try to curtail that situation. On his first day in office, he ordered the federal government to stop recognizing automatic citizenship for babies born to illegal immigrants and temporary visitors.
Judges have put that policy on hold and the matter has sped to the Supreme Court, which has scheduled an emergency oral argument for next month.
Mr. Homan on Monday said it’s wrong to say the U.S. deported the children.
“The parents made that decision, not the United States government,” he said.
But he said having a citizen child “does not make you immune from our laws.”
“We got a secure border by enforcing laws. We’re not making this up. We’re enforcing laws under statute enacted by Congress, and it’s the right thing to do,” he said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” pointed out that U.S. citizen children can return at any time.
“The children went with their mothers. Those children are U.S. citizens. They can come back into the United States if there is their father or someone here who wants to assume them,” he said.
