A federal judge in Washington has temporarily blocked the deportation of a group of Guatemalan children who crossed the United States border without their families, after lawyers argued that the minors were being placed on planes in violation of laws designed to protect migrant children.
Attorneys for ten Guatemalan children, aged between 10 and 17, filed papers late on Saturday reporting that the youngsters were due to be flown to Guatemala within hours. Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ruled on Sunday that the children could not be deported for at least 14 days, ordering that they be returned from the aircraft to the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement while legal proceedings continue.
“I do not want there to be any ambiguity,” Judge Sooknanan said during an emergency hearing, stressing that her decision applies broadly to Guatemalan minors who arrived in the country without parents or guardians.
Government lawyers insisted that the children were not being deported but reunited with their families at the request of parents or guardians, a claim disputed by the children’s legal representatives in some cases.
Similar emergency filings were made in Arizona and Illinois, as lawyers sought to prevent the removal of unaccompanied minors in other jurisdictions.
At Harlingen airport in southern Texas on Sunday morning, buses carrying migrants were seen arriving directly onto the tarmac, where federal agents moved between the vehicles and waiting aircraft. Police vehicles circled the perimeter as security officers kept reporters back from the fencing around the field. Several planes, engines running, stood ready for departure while the legal battle was under way in Washington.
The Trump administration is preparing to remove nearly 700 Guatemalan children who entered the United States unaccompanied, according to a letter issued on Friday by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. The Guatemalan government has said it is prepared to accept their return.
An email circulated on Thursday by Melissa Johnston, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s programme for unaccompanied children, instructed staff to halt the release of Guatemalan minors except in cases where they were being placed with parents or legal guardians in the US, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.
Lawyers representing the children argue that the government lacks authority to remove them and is denying due process by blocking their asylum claims and immigration applications. Many of the children, they said, have active cases pending in immigration courts.
The legal complaint, filed jointly by the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights and the National Immigration Law Center, alleges that children are being “illegally transferred” to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in order to place them on flights to Guatemala. The groups contend such removals would contravene statutory protections for vulnerable minors and place them at risk of “abuse, neglect, persecution or even torture”.
Migrant children who arrive at the border without parents are ordinarily placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which arranges for them to live in supervised shelters or foster care until they can be released to a sponsor, often a family member already in the US.
