A federal judge in Louisiana on Friday said that a 2-year-old U.S. citizen appears to have been taken with her mother to Honduras with no meaningful due process.
In an order scheduling a hearing for next month, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty wrote that the child was sent to Honduras on Friday with her mother, who had been ordered to be removed.
“The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” Doughty wrote. “But the Court doesn’t know that.”
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the "parent made the decision to take the child with them to Honduras," adding that "it is common that parents want to be removed with their children.”
Mich P. González, who is representing the mother in the case and is the co-founder of Sanctuary of the South, an immigration and LGBTQ civil rights cooperative, said that was not the case in a phone interview Saturday night.
“ICE is mischaracterizing that this was her wish,” González said. “This woman was held in an undisclosed hotel.”
González added that the woman is pregnant and that ICE prevented her from talking to her lawyers or anyone in her family to make arrangements.
The Louisiana court called a government lawyer at 12:19 p.m. local time to speak with the child’s mother, while the plane was in the air, and was called back at 1:06 p.m. and told that mother and child were already in Honduras, Doughty wrote.
Doughty wrote that the May 16 hearing was “In the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
Doughty, chief judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017 and confirmed by the Senate the next year.
The mother and her two daughters, including the U.S. citizen who is identified as VML in court documents, were seized Tuesday morning in New Orleans by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the woman went to a scheduled meeting with the agency, lawyers opposing the deportation wrote.
The family was checking in with an “Intensive Supervision Appearance Program” office, the attorneys wrote. The mother, from Honduras, had been freed from ICE detention in 2021 under that program, they wrote.
“During the approximate three days they held her with her children, cut off from family and counsel, ICE made her feel threatened and coerced into accepting the deportation under duress,” González said.
The father of VML, who lives in the U.S., sought custody of VML after the mother was detained this week and asked that the girl be placed with a custodian who is “ready and willing” to care for her in the U.S., attorneys for the custodian wrote.
VML was born in Baton Rouge on Jan. 4, 2023, and is a U.S. citizen, the attorneys with the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild wrote. The other child is 11 years old and was born in Honduras.
Attorneys who sought to stop the child’s removal argued that removing her violates the Constitution and her rights as a U.S. citizen.
Lawyers for the government said that the child’s mother has legal custody of the child and that she indicated in a letter she would take her daughter to Honduras.
The letter, in Spanish, reads, “I will take my daughter ... with me to Honduras.”
An image of the handwritten letter is dated Thursday at 6:23 p.m., when the woman and child were in ICE custody and before they were removed Friday.
“They submitted a document that they claim shows our client’s consent to all of this," González said. "That document is a hand-written note that essentially states that her child would be leaving with her to Honduras, and it’s clear that the part that is blacked out is that it’s written in hotel stationary."
