An American federal judge has temporarily paralyzed the deportation of several hundred Guatemalan children. The order has arrived almost at the last moment, when a group of minors was already within the planes that were going to transport them at dawn from Texas to their country of origin. The decision of magistrate Sparkle Sooknanan has arrived in response to a lawsuit filed by children’s lawyers, who claim that expulsion would violate US laws and endanger vulnerable minors once they landed back in their homeland.
The order of the judge, in force for the next 14 days, is the most recent setback suffered by the hard immigration policy of the Donald Trump administration. On Friday, another federal magistrate, Jia Cobb, paralyzed the expansion of the rapid expulsion policy that the Republican ordered after his return to power in January this year. Cobb considered that this extension runs the risk of deporting people who have the right to remain in the United States and violates the right to a fair trial enshrined by the Constitution. Hours earlier, another court slowed the elimination of temporary protection status for Venezuelans, which shielded hundreds of thousands of people against deportation.
In the case that originated the order of magistrate Sooknan, the lawyers had filed the lawsuit on behalf of ten children under 16. But the judge indicated that her veto, temporary while the courts decide whether the deportation is pertinent, must be applied in general to Guatemalan children arriving in the United States without their parents or guardians and in custody of the Office of Refugee Rease. “I don’t want any ambiguity,” he stressed, “no child cannot be expelled,” the case is examined. Near 2,000 Guatemalan children are in host shelters distributed throughout the country.
At the audience convened in a hurry, Sooknan revealed that he had received a phone call at 2:32 in the morning to notify him that the minors were about to be expelled to Guatemala. “I have the Government trying to deport unaccompanied minors in the early morning of a bridge weekend, which is surprising. But things are,” he said. Monday is a holiday in the US.
The judge also demanded that the Government provide evidence that, as he says, he returns the children because they have been claimed by their relatives from Guatemala. “That is what they have told me,” replied the prosecutor of the Drew Design Department of Justice. The lawyers of the minors sharply reject that that is the case, and claim that, even if it was, the administration would have to follow a legal process that has not been adhered. When expelling them, they maintain, they would not be guaranteed the constitutional right to a fair trial because they would not have the opportunity to ask for asylum or to see their situation in an immigration court. Many of them have pending cases in these courts, the lawyers point out.
Unaccompanied children arriving in the United States and are intercepted near the border are under the custody of the refugee resettlement office and are transferred to a shelter for minors or a host family, while a sponsor who is already in the United States, usually a relative, takes care of them.
In this case, the children that the Government tried to deport were welcomed in shelters, waiting to move on to the custody of a sponsor. The demand, presented by the National Center for Migration Law and the Young Center for the Rights of Immigrant Children, argues that the Administration is “illegally transferring to the custody of the Immigration and Customs Agency (ICE, for its acronym in English) to send them in airplanes to Guatemala, where they can face abuse, persecution, torture or negligence”.
The lawsuit addressed this Sunday in the Federal Court is similar to others raised in other parts of the country, from Arizona to Illinois, to block deportations of unaccompanied minors.
A letter sent on Friday by Senator Ron Wyden, from Oregon, indicated that the Trump administration intended to deport about 700 unaccompanied Guatemalans. The Guatemala government has declared that it is willing to admit them.
The cases of unaccompanied minors are especially delicate within the Trump administration immigration policy, since they have the right to special protections that adults do not automatically receive.
In the last decade, hundreds of thousands of children, most from Central America countries, have crossed the southern border to enter the United States, many of them to meet with a relative or friends. A good part has obtained the right to remain in the country, after demonstrating that they were abandoned or ran risk of persecution in their countries of origin.