Guatemalan

President Donald Trump speaks to the press before boarding Marine One en route to the United Kingdom on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, on Tuesday. A federal court judge Thursday blocked Trump administration’s efforts to deport at least 600 Guatemalan children. Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo

Sept. 18 (UPI) — A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to deport at least 600 Guatemalan children, rejecting claims by the Department of Homeland Security that the move was an effort to reunite them with their parents.

Judge Timothy Kelly of the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia said in his ruling that the administration’s claim that it was reuniting children with their parents “crumbled like a house of cards” because “there is no evidence before the Court that the parents of these children sought their return to Guatemala.”

Kelly temporarily stopped the administration from transferring, repatriating, removing or otherwise aiding in the transport of any of the 76 Guatemalan migrant children that immigration authorities attempted to deport in the middle of the night during the Labor Day weekend.

Attorneys representing the children said they were notified by federal officials late at night that they were being “repatriated,” the ruling said.

The Trump administration pushed back on Kelly’s ruling

“This judge is blocking efforts to REUNIFY CHILDREN with their families,” Tricia McLaughlin, Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary, said in a statement to NBC News. “Now these children will have to go to shelters. All just to ‘get Trump.’ This is disgraceful and immoral.”

Kelly, appointed by President Donald Trump, referenced a report from the Guatemalan attorney general’s office in response to the administration’s plan to deport more than 600 children to the country. The report said no parents had requested the return of their children.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Thursday blocked President Trump’s administration from immediately deporting Guatemalan migrant children who came to the U.S. alone back to their home country, the latest step in a court struggle over one of the most sensitive issues in Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly comes after the Republican administration’s Labor Day weekend attempt to remove Guatemalan migrant children who were living in government shelters and foster care.

There was already a temporary order in place preventing the removal of Guatemalan children. But that was set to expire Tuesday.

Kelly, who was appointed by Trump, granted a preliminary injunction extends that temporary protection indefinitely, although the government can appeal.

There are also temporary restraining orders in separate cases in Arizona and Illinois, but those cases are much more narrow in the scope of children they cover.

TUCSON — A federal judge in Arizona temporarily blocked the Trump administration from removing dozens of Guatemalan and Honduran children living in shelters or foster care after coming to the U.S. alone, according to a decision Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez in Tucson extended until at least Sept. 26 a temporary restraining issued over the Labor Day weekend. Márquez raised concern over whether the government had arranged for any of the children’s parents or legal guardians in Guatemala to take custody of them.

Laura Belous, attorney for the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, which represents the children, said in court that the minors had expressed no desire to be repatriated to their native Guatemala and Honduras amid concerns they could face neglect, possible child trafficking or hardships associated with individual medical conditions.

Lawyers for the children said that their clients have said they fear going home, and that the government is not following laws designed to protect migrant children.

A legal aid group filed a lawsuit in Arizona on behalf of 57 Guatemalan children and 12 from Honduras between the ages of 3 and 17.

Denise Ann Faulk, an assistant U.S. attorney under the Trump administration, emphasized that the child repatriations were negotiated at high diplomatic levels and would avoid lengthy prohibitions on returning to the U.S.

Nearly all the children were in the custody of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement and living at shelters in the Phoenix and Tucson areas. Similar lawsuits filed in Illinois and Washington seek to stop the government from removing the children.

The Arizona lawsuit demands that the government grant the children their right to present their cases to an immigration judge, to have access to legal counsel and to be placed in the least restrictive setting that is in their best interest.

The Trump administration has argued it is acting in the best interest of the children by trying to reunite them with their families at the behest of the Guatemalan government. After Guatemalan officials toured U.S. detention facilities, the government said that it was “very concerned” and that it would take children who wanted to return voluntarily.

Children began crossing the border alone in large numbers in 2014, peaking at 152,060 in the 2022 fiscal year. July’s arrest tally translates to an annual clip of 5,712 arrests, reflecting how illegal crossings have dropped to their lowest levels in six decades.

Guatemalans accounted for 32% of residents at government-run holding facilities last year, followed by Hondurans, Mexicans and Salvadorans. A 2008 law requires children to appear before an immigration judge with an opportunity to pursue asylum, unless they are from Canada and Mexico. The vast majority are released from shelters to parents, legal guardians or immediate family while their cases wind through court.

The Arizona lawsuit was amended to include 12 children from Honduras who have expressed to an Arizona legal aid group that they do not want to return to Honduras, as well as four additional children from Guatemala who have come into government custody in Arizona since the lawsuit was initially filed Aug. 30.

Judge Márquez said she found it “frightening” that U.S. officials may not have coordinated with the children’s parents. She also expressed concern that the government was denying the children access to review by an experienced immigration judge, and noted that legal representatives for the children were notified of preparations for child departures with little notice, late at night.

“On a practical matter, it just seems that a lot of these things that [the Office of Refugee Resettlement] has taken upon themselves to do — such as screening and making judicial determinations that should be made by an immigration judge with expertise and time to meet with a lawyer and meet with a child — is just surpassed by saying ‘we’re reuniting them’” with parents, Márquez said in court as she pressed Faulk for more information.

Billeaud and Lee write for the Associated Press.

District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s emergency order follows a legal complaint brought on behalf of 10 children.

A United States judge has blocked the administration of US President Donald Trump from deporting unaccompanied Guatemalan children for at least the next two weeks, in the government’s ongoing hardline anti-immigration push.

The order, which was issued on Sunday in response to a complaint filed by a pro-immigrant advocacy group, came as some Guatemalan children were reportedly already put onto planes at a Texas airport and huddled inside.

District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s emergency decree followed a petition from the National Immigration Law Center in relation to 10 children aged between 10 and 17.

After initially preventing the deportation of the group, Sooknanan, who is based in Washington, DC, widened the order to include all Guatemalan children who had reached the US without a parent or guardian.

Sooknanan also brought forward a hearing about the issue on Sunday due to reports that some of the children were in the process of being removed from the US during the country’s Labor Day holiday weekend.

“I do not want there to be any ambiguity,” the judge said on Sunday, noting that her decision applied broadly to unaccompanied Guatemalan minors.

The flurry of legal activity came days after reports in the US media that the Trump administration was preparing to start child deportations to Guatemala this weekend, following an agreement with the Central American country.

Such a move would constitute a “clear violation of the unambiguous protections that Congress has provided them as vulnerable children”, according to the National Immigration Law Center’s legal challenge.

Although the children should be under the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the US government was set on “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”, the complaint added.

On Friday, Guatemala’s Foreign Minister Carlos Martinez confirmed that his country was willing to receive hundreds of children who were in the US.

Since the start of his second presidential term in January, Trump has attempted to start deporting refugees and immigrants en masse.

His administration’s anti-immigration actions, which have included sending hundreds of people to a notorious prison in El Salvador, have been beset by legal difficulties.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the most high-profile face of the Trump administration’s crackdown and a Salvadoran man legally residing in the US state of Maryland, was mistakenly deported in March. He was severely beaten and subjected to psychological torture in prison there, his lawyers say.

Abrego Garcia now wishes to seek asylum in the US. His lawyers told a judge in recent days that he fears further persecution and torture should the Trump administration succeed in deporting him to Uganda, as it plans to do.

HARLINGEN, Texas — A U.S. judge at least temporarily blocked the government Sunday from deporting a group of Guatemalan children who had crossed the border without their families, after their lawyers said the youngsters were loaded onto planes overnight in violation of laws affording protections for migrant kids.

Attorneys for 10 Guatemalan children, ages 10 to 17, said in court papers filed late Saturday that there were reports that planes were set to take off within hours for the Central American country. But a federal judge in Washington said those children couldn’t be deported for at least 14 days, and after a hastily scheduled hearing Sunday, she emphasized that they needed to be taken off the planes and back to the Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities while the legal process plays out.

“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.

Government lawyers, meanwhile, maintained that the children weren’t being deported but rather reunited at the request of their parents or guardians — a claim that the children’s lawyers dispute, at least in some cases.

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.

Immigrant advocates react

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. While the deportations are on hold for now, the case underscores the high-stakes clash between the government’s immigration enforcement efforts and the legal safeguards that Congress created for some of the most vulnerable migrants.

At the border-area airport, the scene Sunday morning was unmistakably active. Buses carrying migrants pulled onto the tarmac as clusters of federal agents moved quickly between the vehicles and waiting aircraft. Police cars circled the perimeter, and officers and security guards pushed reporters back from the chain-link fences that line the field. On the runway, planes sat with engines idling, ground crews making final preparations as if departures could come at any moment — all as the courtroom battle played out hundreds of miles away in Washington.

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.

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 started hearing a few weeks ago from legal service providers that agents from Homeland Security Investigations — ICE’s investigative arm — were interviewing children, particularly from Guatemala, in Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities.

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 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.

Gonzalez and Santana write for the Associated Press and reported from Harlingen and Washington, respectively. AP writers Jennifer Peltz in New York and Corey Williams in Detroit contributed to this report.

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration late Friday to facilitate the return of a Guatemalan man it deported to Mexico in spite of his fears of being harmed there.

The man, who is gay, was protected from being returned to his home country under a U.S. immigration judge’s order at the time. But the U.S. put him on a bus and sent him to Mexico instead, a removal that U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy found probably “lacked any semblance of due process.”

Mexico has since returned him to Guatemala, where he is in hiding, according to court documents. An earlier court proceeding determined that the man, identified by the initials O.C.G., risked persecution or torture if returned to Guatemala, but said he also feared returning to Mexico. He presented evidence of being raped and held for ransom in Mexico while seeking asylum in the U.S.

“No one has ever suggested that O.C.G. poses any sort of security threat,” Murphy wrote. “In general, this case presents no special facts or legal circumstances, only the banal horror of a man being wrongfully loaded onto a bus and sent back to a country where he was allegedly just raped and kidnapped.”

Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said O.C.G. was in the country illegally, was “granted withholding of removal to Guatemala” and was instead sent to Mexico, which she said was “a safe third option for him, pending his asylum claim.”

McLaughlin called the judge a “federal activist judge” and said the administration expects to be vindicated by a higher court.

Murphy’s order adds to a string of findings by federal courts against recent Trump administration deportations. Those have included other deportations to third countries and the erroneous deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran who had lived as a legal U.S. resident in Maryland for 14 years while working and raising a family.

The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. from a notorious prison in El Salvador, rejecting the White House’s claim that it couldn’t retrieve him after mistakenly deporting him. The White House and the Salvadoran president have said they are powerless to return him. The Trump administration has tried to invoke the state secrets privilege, arguing that releasing details in open court — or even to the judge in private — about returning Abrego Garcia to the United States would jeopardize national security.

In his Friday ruling, Murphy nodded to the dispute over the verb “facilitate” in that case and others, saying that returning O.C.G. to the U.S. is not complicated.

“The Court notes that ‘facilitate’ in this context should carry less baggage than in several other notable cases,” he wrote. “O.C.G. is not held by any foreign government. Defendants have declined to make any argument that facilitating his return would be costly, burdensome, or otherwise impede the government’s objectives.”

Smyth writes for the Associated Press.