HARLINGEN, Texas (AP) — After the U.S. government loaded children onto planes overnight to be sent back to their native Guatemala, a federal judge temporarily blocked the flights — with the youngsters still inside — as their attorneys said authorities were violating U.S. laws and sending vulnerable kids into potential peril.
The extraordinary drama played out over predawn hours on a U.S. holiday weekend and vaulted from tarmacs in Texas to a courtroom in Washington. It was the latest showdown over the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration — and the latest high-stakes clash between the administration’s enforcement efforts and legal safeguards that Congress created for vulnerable migrants.
For now, hundreds of Guatemalan children who arrived unaccompanied will stay while the legal fight plays out over the coming weeks.
“I do not want there to be any ambiguity,” said Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, who said her ruling applies broadly to Guatemalan minors who arrived in the U.S. without their parents or guardians.
Minutes after she wrapped up a hastily scheduled hearing Sunday afternoon, five charter buses pulled up to a plane parked at the border-area airport in Harlingen, Texas. Hours earlier, authorities had walked dozens of passengers — perhaps 50 — toward the plane in a part of the airport that’s restricted to government planes, including deportation flights. The passengers were wearing colored clothing that is used in government-run shelters for migrant children.
The U.S. government insists it’s reuniting the Guatemalan children with parents or guardians who sought their return. Lawyers for at least some of the minors say that’s nonsense and argue that in any event, authorities still would have to follow a legal process that they did not.
While Sunday’s court hearing came in a case filed in federal court in Washington, similar emergency requests were filed in other parts of the country as well. Attorneys in Arizona and Illinois asked federal judges there to block deportations of unaccompanied minors, underscoring how the fight over the government’s efforts has quickly spread.
Alarm bells raised among immigrant advocates
The episode has raised alarms among immigrant advocates, who say it may represent a violation of federal laws designed to protect children who arrive without their parents.
Shaina Aber of Acacia Center for Justice, an immigrant legal defense group, said it was notified Saturday evening that an official list had been drafted with the names of Guatemalan children whom the U.S. administration would attempt to send back to their home country. Advocates learned that the flights would leave from the Texas cities of Harlingen and El Paso, Aber said.
She said she’d heard that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials “were still taking the children,” having not gotten any guidance about the court order.
The Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday.
Trump administration plans to remove nearly 700 Guatemalan children
The Trump administration is planning to remove nearly 700 Guatemalan children who came to the U.S. unaccompanied, according to a letter sent Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon. The Guatemalan government has said it is ready to take them in.
It is another step in the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration enforcement efforts, which include plans to send a surge of officers to Chicago for an immigration crackdown, ramping up deportations and ending protections for people who have had permission to live and work in the United States.
Lawyers for the Guatemalan children said the U.S. government doesn’t have the authority to remove the youngsters and is depriving them of due process by preventing them from pursuing asylum claims or immigration relief. Many have active cases in immigration courts, according to the attorneys’ court filing in Washington.
Although the children are supposed to be in the care and custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the government is “illegally transferring them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody to put them on flights to Guatemala, where they may face abuse, neglect, persecution, or torture,” argues the filing by attorneys with the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights and the National Immigration Law Center.
An attorney with another advocacy group, the National Center for Youth Law, said the organization starting hearing a few weeks ago from legal service providers that Homeland Security Investigations agents were interviewing children — particularly from Guatemala — in Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities. HSI is ICE’s investigative arm.
The agents asked the children about their relatives in Guatemala, said the attorney, Becky Wolozin.
Then, on Friday, advocates across the country began getting word that their young clients’ immigration court hearings were being canceled, Wolozin said.
Migrant children traveling without their parents or guardians are handed over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement when they are encountered by officials along the U.S.-Mexico border. Once in the U.S., the children often live in government-supervised shelters or with foster care families until they can be released to a sponsor — usually a family member — living in the country.
The minors can request asylum, juvenile immigration status or visas for victims of sexual exploitation.
Due to their age and often traumatic experiences getting to the U.S., their treatment is one of the most sensitive issues in immigration. Advocacy groups already have sued to ask courts to halt new Trump administration vetting procedures for unaccompanied children, saying the changes are keeping families separated longer and are inhumane.
Guatemala says it is willing to receive the unaccompanied minors
Guatemalan Foreign Affairs Minister Carlos Martínez said Friday that the government has told the U.S. it is willing to receive hundreds of Guatemalan minors who arrived in the U.S. unaccompanied and are being held in government facilities.
Guatemala is particularly concerned about minors who could pass age limits for the children’s facilities and be sent to adult detention centers, he said.
President Bernardo Arévalo has said that his government has a moral and legal obligation to advocate for the children. His comments came days after U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited Guatemala.
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Santana reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz in New York and Corey Williams in Detroit contributed.
