A federal judge in Louisiana said Friday that a 2 -year -old American citizen seems to have been deported with his mother to Honduras without due process.
In a programming order of a hearing for next month, the United States district judge, Terry Doughty, wrote that the child was sent to Honduras on Friday with his mother who had been ordered to be removed.
“The government argues that all this is fine because the mother wants the girl to be deported with her,” Doughty wrote. “But the Court does not know that.”
The Louisiana court called a government lawyer at 12:19 pm to talk to the child’s mother, while the plane was in the air, and was called at 1:06 pm and told him that the mother and the child were already in Honduras, Doughty wrote.
Doughty wrote that the May 16 audience was “in the interest of dissipating our strong suspicion that the government simply deported an American citizen without a significant process.”
Doughty, the main judge in the United States District Court for the West District of Louisiana, was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017 and confirmed by the Senate the following year.
The mother and her two daughters, including the American citizen who identifies as VML in judicial documents, were seized on Tuesday morning in New Orleans for the application of immigration and customs when the mother went to a scheduled meeting with the agency, the lawyers who oppose deportation wrote.
The family was registering with an “Intensive Supervision Appearance Program”, the lawyers wrote. The mother, from Honduras, had been released from the arrest of ice in 2021 under that program, they wrote.
VML’s father, who lives in the United States, looked for VML’s custody after the mother was arrested and asked that the girl be placed with a custodian that is “ready and willing” to take care of her in the United States, wrote lawyers for the custodian.
But VML was born in Baton Rouge on January 4, 2023 and is an American citizen, the lawyers of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers’ union wrote. The other child is 11 years old and was born in Honduras.
The lawyers who sought to stop the child’s deportation argued that eliminating it violates the Constitution and its rights as an American citizen.
The government lawyers said that the child’s mother has the legal custody of the child and that she indicated in a letter that would take her daughter to Honduras.
The letter, in Spanish, says: “I will take my daughter … with me to Honduras.”
An image of the handwritten letter is dated Thursday at 6:23 pm, when the woman and the child were in ice custody and before being deported on Friday.
The National Security Department and ICE did not immediately respond to comments requests on Friday night.
