What happens with US citizen children caught up in Trump’s deportation push

The Trump administration’s removal to Honduras last week of three children who are US citizens underscores how its push to carry out a historic deportation campaign can result in extraordinary circumstances and violations of internal policies and due process rights intended avoid such situations, legal experts say.

The Trump administration’s removal to Honduras last week of three children who are US citizens underscores how its push to carry out a historic deportation campaign can result in extraordinary circumstances and violations of internal policies and due process rights intended to avoid such situations, legal experts say. The at-times slapdash approach has resulted in the government running up against the parental rights of some undocumented adults and the rights of their US citizen children, who enjoy all the same legal protections as other US citizens. The three young children from two families were removed to Honduras with their mothers who were deported within hours or days of the women attending routine meetings with officials in Louisiana as part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. The Trump administration argues that US citizen children can always return to the US so their due process rights are different from those of noncitizens, and it has claimed that the mothers of the children recently deported wanted to keep their kids with them – something that has been disputed by the mothers. The deportations, however, experts told CNN, also run afoul of an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy that lays out procedures to ensure situations like these are handled in a much more methodical and protracted way. “Right now, the emphasis is on numbers, numbers, numbers – deport as many people as possible. These are all mothers who had removal orders, so they’re easy to deport. You don’t have to go through a whole hearing process unless an immigration judge grants a petition to reopen the case. So the focus is on just getting them out the door,” said Stacy Brustin, an expert on immigration and family law who serves as the director of the Immigration Law & Policy Initiative at Catholic Law. “This rushed process, however, tramples on the due process rights of all involved and directly violates ICE’s own policy directive.”