A federal judge in Louisiana on Friday said the 2-year-old US citizen appears to have been deported to Honduras with his mother without a meaningful due process.
In the order of hearings next month, US District Judge Terry Doughty wrote that the child was sent to Honduras on Friday.
“The government insists that all this is okay as the mother wants the child to be deported to her,” Dauty writes. “But the courts don’t know that.”
The Louisiana State Court called government lawyers at 12:19pm to talk to the child’s mother and found out she was on a plane in the air, the judge said. By phone at 1:06pm, the court was told that the pair was already in Honduras, Dauty wrote.
Doughty wrote that the May 16 hearing was “to dispel our strong suspicion that the government had just deported US citizens without a meaningful process.”
Doughty, the Supreme Court justice of the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017 and confirmed by the Senate the following year.
The mother, including a US citizen identified as VML in court documents, and her two daughters, were seized in New Orleans Tuesday morning by immigration and customs enforcement, and the woman went to a scheduled meeting with the agency, written by lawyers against deportation.
The family was checking in at the “Intensive Supervisory Appearance Program” office, the lawyer wrote. The Honduras mother was released from ice custody in 2021 under the program, they wrote.
The VML father, who lives in the US, sought custody of the VML after her mother was taken into custody this week, and asked the girl to place her in the US “ready and willing” in the US, a custodian lawyer wrote.
VML was born in Baton Rouge on January 4, 2023 and is a US citizen, written by a lawyer for Guild’s National Immigration Project. The other child was 11 years old and was born in Honduras.
The lawyer who tried to stop the deportation of children argued that removing her violated the Constitution and her rights as a US citizen.
Government lawyers said the child’s mother had pointed out that she would have legal custody of the child and would take her daughter to Honduras in a letter.
The Spanish letter reads, “I will take my daughter… I will take her to Honduras.”
The handwritten letter image is dated Thursday at 6:23pm before the woman and child were deported on Friday.
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday night.
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