A federal judge bashed the Trump administration Friday for what he said may have been the deportation of a 2-year-old U.S. citizen.
Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee to the court in Louisiana, said he had a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
The case touches on a thorny area of deportation in which parental rights clash with those of U.S. citizen children.
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.
But Judge Doughty said he doesn’t know that to be true.
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.
The American Civil Liberties Union said there was a second case this week with U.S. citizen children ages 4 and 7 being deported with their family.
The ACLU said in both cases the families were “held incommunicado” before their deportations, raising questions about who was looking out for the children’s interests.
The ACLU asserted that both families might have had claims to be allowed to remain in the U.S. but were unable to lodge those claims because they weren’t allowed to talk to lawyers in time.
Lawyers did file the case on behalf of the 2-year-old, but by the time a judge got involved, the plane was already outside U.S. airspace.
The case harkens back to 2018, when the first Trump administration faced the opposite problem: It deported parents without their children, who were left behind in the U.S.
Those so-called “family separations” became a major political black eye for the administration, forcing President Trump to abandon his zero-tolerance border policy.
Judges at that time ruled that parents had the right to decide whether to have their children go with them or remain in the U.S. as Unaccompanied Alien Children, where they would be placed with sponsors.
