A federal judge blocked the deportation of Guatemalan children and asked the Trump administration to show the court that the children had been taken off planes.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, asked the government to address the current status of the children and show they have been deplaned and moved back to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.
In court documents filed late Sunday evening, a Justice Department official said 76 children were returned to ORR custody or soon to be returned.
The National Immigration Law Center had filed suit early Sunday morning to stop the deportations on behalf of 10 children, unaccompanied minors from Guatemala ages 10 to 17, adding that it had learned flights were scheduled to leave the U.S. within hours. The group said it filed its complaint on behalf of hundreds of Guatemalan children potentially at risk of removal from the U.S.
The judge said her 14-day temporary restraining order applied not just to the 10 plaintiffs but to a broader group of children who were part of a putative class—all Guatemalan unaccompanied minors in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody as of around 1 a.m. Sunday who weren’t subject to a finalized removal order.
The district court moved up a hearing on the matter by several hours after learning that children were in the process of being removed from the country.
“In the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala,” said Efrén C. Olivares, a vice president at the National Immigration Law Center. “We are heartened the Court prevented this injustice from occurring before hundreds of children suffered irreparable harm.”
He said Sunday evening that the court granted the advocacy group’s request “as planes were sitting or ready to depart” from Texas with the Guatemalan children on board.
He said a plane that was in El Paso and headed to Guatemala was now in Harlingen, Texas, and children were deplaning. Children in two planes that were in Harlingen were back on buses to ORR custody or in shelters, he said.
HHS, Homeland Security, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t return requests for comment.
