WASHINGTON (CN) - A federal judge blocked the Trump administration on Thursday from deporting hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children to their home country, finding the government's assertion that parents requested their children's return had "crumbled like a house of cards" due to a lack of evidence.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Donald Trump appointee, issued a preliminary injunction barring the removal of a class of unaccompanied minors who have not received a final removal order nor permission from the attorney general to voluntarily leave the United States, at least until this case is over.
"There is no evidence before the court that the parents of these children sought their return," Kelly wrote. "To the contrary, the Guatemalan attorney general reports that officials could not even track down parents for most of the children whom defendants found eligible for their 'reunification' plan. And none of those that were located had asked for their children to come back to Guatemala."
In the early hours of Aug. 31, the Trump administration transported dozens of Guatemalan children, ages 10 to 17, from federal foster homes operated by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to a Texas airport, where they were to be flown back to Guatemala.
Immediately following the attempted deportations, the Justice Department argued the deportations were intended to reunite children with their families still in Guatemala at the request of the Guatemalan government and relatives.
The children strongly contested that assertion, noting in several declarations that the middle-of-the-night trip to the airport sparked significant fear. One note written by a young girl held at a children's shelter in McAllen, Texas, said she was "so scared that she vomited and asked to speak with a clinician."
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Joe Biden appointee, was the court's emergency-duty judge that weekend. Soon after receiving the lawsuit around 1 a.m., she issued a temporary restraining order halting the removals of the 10 named plaintiffs. She scheduled an emergency hearing later that day, before which she issued a new order further blocking the removal of any unaccompanied Guatemalan minors.
Kelly ruled that the children had adequately shown they were likely to succeed on the merits that their rushed deportations would violate the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which requires the Department of Homeland Security to place an unaccompanied minor in standard removal proceedings and provide them counsel before deporting them.
The Justice Department argued that the removal efforts were an effort to reunify and repatriate the children and that the 2008 statute's protections only apply to removals, so standard removal proceedings do not apply.
Kelly was unconvinced, noting that such an argument ignored the plain meaning of removal and reunification, as a child could be reunited with their guardian after leaving the U.S., but that outcome does not change the fact they were still removed from the country.
"Bottom line: nothing about the word 'reunification' suggests that [the Office of Refugee Resettlement's] duty to 'reunify' an unaccompanied alien child with his parents (if possible) displaces the process that Congress mandated when DHS 'removes' such a child from the United States, even when that removal is a predicate for reunification," Kelly wrote.
Kelly's order extends to a class of more than 600 unaccompanied Guatemalan minors in the country.
According to a letter from the Guatemalan attorney general's office, it received a list of 609 teens between the ages of 14 and 17 that the Office of Refugee Resettlement had identified as potential targets for deportation.
Of those listed, the attorney general's office only had phone numbers for 204 of the families and could only confirm the information of 115. When it called those families, several were surprised or even annoyed because many did not expect their children to return. Parents of 59 of the children refused to "subject themselves to an assessment to determine if they were a suitable family resource."
Ultimately, parents of about 57 of the minors identified "were willing to welcome back their children," according to the attorney general, but even among that group "none of them was requesting their [child's] return."
The parents of one child explained that their daughter received death threats and could not live in Guatemala, so they would "do everything possible to get her out of the country again" if the U.S. sent her back.
Source: Courthouse News Service
