Trump-tapped judge shields Guatemalan kids from deportation
The DOJ's justification for trying to whisk the children away in the dead of night "crumbled like a house of cards," the judge found.
Judges tapped from both sides of the aisle denounced the Trump administration’s dead-of-night rush to hustle Guatemalan children onto a deportation flight over Labor Day weekend.
If that surprises you, dive more closely into what is going on.
It was a “house of cards.”
That’s how a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump described the administration’s claim that they only wanted to deport unaccompanied Guatemalan children in the dead of night on a holiday weekend to reunite them with their families.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly issued an injunction blocking the Trump administration from sending the children back to Guatemala under a law designed to combat human trafficking.
“Fairly outrageous”
Kelly’s strongly worded ruling laid bare the Trump administration’s plan to whisk the children away in the dead of night on a holiday weekend.
“Just before midnight on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, several executive branch agencies began to implement a plan to expel from the United States certain unaccompanied alien children in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services and send them back to their home country of Guatemala,” the 43-page ruling begins. “Those agencies told the children’s caretakers, who were hearing about the plan for the first time, to have them ready for pickup in as little as two hours. The children were roused from their beds in the middle of the night and driven to an airport, where some were loaded onto planes.”
The flights didn’t take off only because their lawyers “got wind of this hasty operation” and sought relief around 1 a.m. Eastern Time that Sunday, winning a temporary restraining order from the judge who was then on emergency duty: U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan. The case was reassigned at the end of her shift to Kelly, who was appointed during Trump’s first term.
If Trump thought a more favorable draw would lead to a different outcome, he was mistaken.
“At a hearing later that day, counsel for [the Trump administration] explained why it was ‘fairly outrageous’ for Plaintiffs to have sued: all [the administration] wanted to do was reunify children with parents who had requested their return,” Kelly wrote. “But that explanation crumbled like a house of cards about a week later. There is no evidence before the Court that the parents of these children sought their return. To the contrary, the Guatemalan Attorney General reports that officials could not even track down parents for most of the children whom [the administration] found eligible for their ‘reunification’ plan.”
In 2018, Kelly ruled in favor of then-CNN reporter Jim Acosta after Trump’s White House tried to revoke his credentials.
“A rushed, seemingly error-laden operation”
The victory for the Guatemalan children is two-fold.
First, their attorneys achieved the certification of a class that includes “all” unaccompanied Guatemalan children who are or will be in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The class includes exceptions for those who received a final order of removal” or the Attorney General’s permission to voluntarily deport.
Second, Judge Kelly blocked the deportation of every member of this class through a preliminary injunction, citing a whistleblower’s report profiling the vulnerable children the Trump administration targeted for deportation.
According to the ruling, some of those children have “indicators of being a victim of child abuse, including death threats, gang violence, [and] human trafficking.”
“One child woken up at 2:00 a.m. on Labor Day Sunday ‘experienced neglect and abandonment from’ his father growing up in Guatemala,” the opinion states. “Despite that history, a ‘supervisor’ put him ‘on a bus headed for the airport’ that morning. … As he was about to board the plane, someone told him that he ‘was not on the list.’ … A close call. Or consider another child seemingly slated for reunification who appears to share a similar history of neglect: his ‘father is not a part of [his] life,’ and his mother lacks ‘resources to care for’ him and ‘does not want [him] to return.’”
Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 in order to "develop policies and procedures” ensuring “that unaccompanied alien children” are “safely repatriated to their country.”
“While Defendants plunged ahead in the middle of the night with their ‘reunification’ plan and then represented to a judge that a parent or guardian had requested each child’s return, that turned out not to be true,” Kelly wrote. “Such a rushed, seemingly error-laden operation to send unaccompanied alien children back to their home countries is one of the things that the TVPRA’s process prevents.”
Kelly added that if courts hadn’t acted quickly, the harm to the children could have been irreversible.
Read the ruling in full here, and watch an interview on this subject here.
Thanks for a Humanitarian in the middle of the night - Judge Kelly knows about humanity! Thanks Adam for bringing the truth to the fore!
Attorneys who tell lies in court should be disciplined.