The undocumented migrant mothers of three US-born children, including a cancer patient, are shocked and traumatized after the United States deported them to Honduras, their lawyers said Monday.
The expulsions last week from the southern state of Louisiana come as US President Donald Trump takes a hard-line approach to migration.
Jenny Lopez Villela was deported on Friday with her two-year-old daughter, while another, unnamed woman was sent back with her four and seven-year-old children, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Immigration Project (NIP).
The ACLU said the four-year-old has “a rare form of metastatic cancer” and was flown home without medication or medical consultations.
Lopez, who is pregnant, also has an 11-year-old daughter born in Honduras who was on the deportation flight with her.
The children’s fathers remained in the United States.
“Both families are going through very difficult times” and “are trying to figure out how they will recover, what steps they will take,” Lopez’s attorney Mich Gonzalez said.
Michelle Mendez, an immigrants’ rights attorney at the NIP, described the situation as “quite tragic” and said the families have been through “trauma.”
Tom Homan, Trump’s point man on border security, told reporters at the White House Monday that the children were not deported, and it was their mothers’ decision to take them with them to Honduras.
“If you choose to have a US citizen child knowing you’re in this country illegally, you put yourself in that position. You put your family in that position. What we did is remove children with their mothers who requested the children depart with them. This is a parenting decision… The mothers made that choice,” he said.
Honduras’s Vice Chancellor Antonio Garcia told AFP the government was investigating the matter.
President Xiomara Castro “is concerned about this situation… of separating families. We want due process to be respected,” he said.
A federal judge in Louisiana has scheduled a hearing for May 16 into the case of Lopez’s two-year-old daughter “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process.”
The girl’s father had filed an emergency request for a temporary restraining order to obtain her return.
The deportations come as Trump is attempting to end birthright citizenship — a principle enshrined in the US Constitution for more than 150 years.
His administration has butted heads with federal judges, rights groups and Democrats who say he has trampled or ignored constitutional rights in rushing to deport migrants, sometimes without the right to a hearing.
