A 2-year-old U.S. citizen from Louisiana was deported to Honduras, federal judge says

A 2-year-old Louisiana girl who is a U.S. citizen was deported by Trump administration officials this week with “no meaningful process,” a federal judge wrote in a court order late Friday night.

U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had flown the child — a Baton Rouge-born girl described in court records by the initials VML — to Honduras. She was deported along with her mother and 11-year-old sister who were not U.S. citizens and had active deportation orders for entering the country illegally.

The 2-year-old appeared to have been deported on Friday despite pleas from immigration attorneys and the girl’s father to ICE officials, including in an earlier legal filing, that asserted she had been born in Louisiana and was a U.S. citizen, meaning she is not eligible for deportation, according to court documents.

“The government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” said Doughty, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, and scheduled a hearing on the case for May 16. “But the court doesn’t know that.”

A Trump administration spokesperson did not immediately respond to a text message early Saturday.

The case highlights how the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration agenda is ensnaring people who may not be subject to deportation, particularly without a formal legal process.

In recent weeks, the administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan men to a notorious prison in El Salvador under an agreement with that country’s president, spurring questions from federal judges about what they have described as a lack of due process received by the men prior to their removal.

Detained on Tuesday, deported Friday

According to court filings in the Western District of Louisiana by immigration attorneys representing the 2-year-old girl’s father, Adiel Mendez Sagastume, ICE agents detained the child on Tuesday in New Orleans along with her mother, Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela, and her sister, who were attending a routine ICE check-in that morning.

The father’s immigration attorneys described communicating with ICE agents multiple times before the girl was deported. Yet federal officials refused to release VML to a legal custodian, Trish Mack, who was appointed by her father, even after the lawyers pointed out that the girl is a U.S. citizen, the attorneys said.

In response to Sagastume’s filing, Justice Department attorneys said that the little girl’s mother “made known to ICE officials that she wanted to retain custody of V.M.L.” and that she wished to bring the girl with her to Honduras.

Filings indicate that after being taken to an ICE detention center in Alexandria, the girl, her sister and her mother were put on a plane and sent to Honduras on Friday.

In his order, Doughty wrote that he called the administration’s lawyers shortly after noon on Friday “so that we could speak with VML’s mother and survey her consent and custodial rights.”

The government lawyers called back shortly after 1 p.m. and said that speaking with VML’s mother “would not be possible, because she (and presumably VML) had just been released in Honduras,” Doughty wrote. 

Doughty ordered the May 16 hearing at the federal courthouse in Monroe “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

The administration’s actions spurred an outcry from immigration advocates and attorneys. In a news release, the ACLU of Louisiana criticized a lack of careful review that preceded what they described as the stunning step of deporting a United States citizen.

“These types of disappearances are reminiscent of the darkest eras in our country’s history and put everyone, regardless of immigration status, at risk,” said Homero Lopez, an attorney with the Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy organization and former immigration judge, in the release.

The ACLU said that the Trump administration had deported another mother and two additional children, both of whom the organization described as U.S. citizens, the same week as VML was returned to Honduras with her mother.

The families “had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities,” the ACLU said.