Court stops Trump’s middle-of-the-night deportation of children

Some of President Trump’s immigration policies suffered a setback in one federal court and a victory in another.

In one case, a federal judge temporarily barred the administration from swiftly deporting nearly 330 Guatemalan children under the premise of reuniting families.

That assertion “crumbled like a house of cards” because the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was unable to prove “the parents of these children sought their return” as it claimed they had, District Judge Timothy Kelly said in issuing a preliminary injunction Sept. 18.

“There is no evidence before the court that the parents of these children sought their return. 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.”

Kelly, a Trump appointee, also described the terrifying manner in which the federal government attempted to hastily deport some of the children before being blocked.

“Just before midnight on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, several executive branch agencies began to implement a plan to expel from the United States certain unaccompanied alien children in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services and send them back to their home country of Guatemala,” the order began. “Those agencies told the children’s caretakers, who were hearing about the plan for the first time, to have them ready for pickup in as little as two hours. The children were roused from their beds in the middle of the night and driven to an airport, where some were loaded onto planes.”

Upon learning about the situation, attorneys for the youth filed for emergency relief and were granted a temporary restraining order at 1 a.m. Aug. 31, halting the aircraft from taking off. The government’s argument that it was trying to honor parents’ request for reunification fell through a week later, Kelly said.

“The children were roused from their beds in the middle of the night and driven to an airport, where some were loaded onto planes.”

“The parents of one child explained why: Their daughter ‘had received death threats and therefore could not live in’ Guatemala, so they would ‘do everything possible to get her out of the country again’ if the United States sent her back.”

DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin disputed Kelly’s reasoning in issuing the order.

“This judge is blocking efforts to reunify children with their families. Now these children will have to go to shelters. All just to ‘get Trump.’ This is disgraceful and immoral,” she said in an email to NBC News.

But Kelly concluded a lawsuit promptly filed on behalf of the children likely would succeed in finding their removal a violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.

“Such a rushed, seemingly error-laden operation to send unaccompanied alien children back to their home countries is one of the things that the TVPRA’s process prevents,” he said.

The administration fared better, however, in its ongoing attempt to rescind a Biden-era policy granting a two-year extension of deportation protections and work authorizations to nearly 500,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan immigrants.

The First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston cleared the way Sept. 12 for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to proceed with terminating humanitarian parole for plaintiffs in Svitlana Doe v. Noem, a federal class-action lawsuit filed in February.

The appellate action follows a May 30 U.S. Supreme Court ruling handed down after an emergency request filed by the Trump administration before the appeals court could hear the case. Both decisions reverse a district judge’s order pausing the termination as the case moves through the courts.

“This decision is specifically about CHNV (Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan) humanitarian parole, but it has significant implications for the other humanitarian parole programs at issue in the Svitlana litigation, such as Uniting for Ukraine and Operation Allies Welcome — jeopardizing the lawful status of hundreds of thousands more currently living and working in the U.S.,” according to the Justice Action Center, one of two human rights organizations that filed the lawsuit.

“The Trump administration is fighting tooth and nail to delegalize as many people as possible.”

“The Trump administration is fighting tooth and nail to delegalize as many people as possible, actively creating a larger class of people who are subject to deportation — made up even of those who followed the exact processes the U.S. government required of them,” center Director Karen Tumlin added.

But a three-judge panel of the appellate court concluded the plaintiffs’ case ultimately lacks merit.

“We recognize the risks of irreparable harm persuasively laid out in the district court’s order: that parolees who lawfully arrived in this country were suddenly forced to choose between leaving in less than a month — a choice that potentially includes being separated from their families, communities and lawful employment and returning to dangers in their home countries — or staying after the loss of their legal status, which means the risk of removal proceedings and detention, the loss of any work authorization, and potential effects on their eligibility for other forms of immigration relief in the future,” the judges explained. “But absent a strong showing of likelihood of success on the merits, the risk of such irreparable harms cannot, by itself, support a stay.”

The administration argued humanitarian parole was designed to be temporary and the government has the right and responsibility to terminate the status if deemed necessary.

The effort to dismantle the CHNV program is just one of multiple attempts by Trump to end temporary protection programs established by previous administrations and fits into the wider policy of mass deportations.

Ending the program is a matter of returning “to common-sense policies” and restoring public safety, McLaughlin said in response to the Supreme Court decision in May.

“The Biden administration lied to America. They allowed more than half a million poorly vetted aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela and their immediate family members to enter the United States through these disastrous parole programs; granted them opportunities to compete for American jobs and undercut American workers; forced career civil servants to promote the programs even when fraud was identified; and then blamed Republicans in Congress for the chaos that ensued and the crime that followed.”