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 V.M.L. — to Honduras. She was deported Friday 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 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, according to court records. Deporting a citizen is "illegal and unconstitutional," Doughty, a Trump appointee, wrote in his order.
"The government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her," Doughty said. "But the court doesn't know that."
A White House spokesperson did not respond to multiple text and phone messages Saturday. An ICE spokesperson did not respond to emailed questions about the case.
Doughty ordered a 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 case highlights how Trump's sweeping second-term immigration agenda is ensnaring people who may not be subject to deportation, particularly without a formal legal process.
The administration in recent weeks flew 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 the men received prior to their removal.
Louisiana has played a central role in Trump's immigration crackdown in part due to its large number of ICE detention facilities, including an Alexandria facility connected to an airport from which the agency conducts deportation flights. The state is second only to Texas for the number of immigrants it holds in ICE detention.
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 family lives in the Baton Rouge area.
A member of the tactical team from the New Orleans ICE field office knocks on a door during an early morning raid to pick up an illegal immigrant who is a multiple DUI offender and is on the deportation list in Kenner , La. Wednesday, June 8, 2022. The person they were looking for no longer lived at the address. (Photo by Max Becherer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
The father's attorneys described communicating with ICE agents multiple times before the girl was deported. Yet federal officials refused to release V.M.L. 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, government 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.
Court filings and a press statement by immigration attorneys indicate that the mother, Lopez Villela, is pregnant.
In his order, Doughty wrote that he called the administration's lawyers shortly after noon on Friday "so that we could speak with V.M.L.’s mother and survey her consent and custodial rights."
The government lawyers called back shortly after 1 p.m. and said that speaking with V.M.L.’s mother "would not be possible, because she (and presumably V.M.L.) had just been released in Honduras," Doughty wrote.
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 V.M.L. 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.