Three young children who are U.S. citizens—including one with cancer—were deported to Honduras alongside their mothers last week, according to advocacy groups and the families' lawyers. One of the children is a four-year-old with Stage 4 cancer who was sent without medication, as stated by a lawyer for the child's family.
Tom Homan, Donald Trump's border czar, claimed that the mothers chose to have their citizen children removed with them. "Having a U.S. citizen child does not make you immune from our laws," he stated, adding that the mothers were in the U.S. illegally. Trump faced significant backlash during his first term for a policy that resulted in the separation of thousands of children from their parents.
On Friday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials from New Orleans deported the two mothers and their three children, aged two, four, and seven, to Honduras from Louisiana, according to a statement from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The two families, including one pregnant mother, had lived in the U.S. for years and were "deported from the U.S. under deeply troubling circumstances that raise serious due process concerns," the ACLU reported.
One of the U.S. citizen children who was removed was suffering from metastatic cancer and was deported without the ability to consult with doctors, the advocacy group alleged. At a news conference on Monday morning, Homan said that deporting families together is preferable to separating them. "We're keeping families together," he remarked. "We removed children with their mothers who requested the children depart with them. There's a parental decision involved."
Homan rejected the term "deported" to describe the removal of the children from the country. "They weren't deported. We don't deport U.S. citizens. Their parents made that decision, not the United States government," he asserted.
Last week, a federal judge expressed a "strong suspicion" that one of the children deported to Honduras, a two-year-old citizen, was sent away without receiving a "meaningful process." The Louisiana-born child and her family members had been apprehended during a routine appointment at a New Orleans immigration office on April 22, according to court documents. Homan, in an interview with CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, stated that "the judge was due process," emphasizing that the two-year-old's mother "had due process at great taxpayer expense and was ordered by an immigration judge after those hearings."
A hearing is scheduled for May 19 for the government to address whether the family was granted due process. The second family was detained on April 24 when ICE failed to respond to their attorneys' and family members' requests to contact them, according to the ACLU.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighted the administration's immigration enforcement actions during its first 100 days on Monday. She mentioned that Trump would sign two new executive orders as part of his crackdown on immigration, including one that directs officials to publish a list of areas identified as "sanctuary cities." The term "sanctuary city" has been used in the U.S. for over a decade to describe places that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities. As it is not a legal term, cities have taken different approaches, with some establishing policies in law and others simply altering policing practices.
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Leavitt also praised an immigration raid at an "underground" nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Sunday, where officials detained more than 100 undocumented immigrants and seized weapons and drugs. The Drug Enforcement Administration reported that 114 immigrants were arrested and placed "on buses for processing and likely eventual deportation."
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House on January 20, thousands of undocumented immigrants have been detained.