2 Year Old USA Citizen Expelled with Mother and Sister Without Due Process

Federal District Court Judge Terry Doughty said a two year old USA-born citizen was expelled to Honduras with her mother and 11 year old sister, who were born there, apparently without due process while her father was petitioning the court on their behalf.

The little girl, called “V.M.L.” in court filings, was with her pregnant mother and sister when they attended a routine immigration check-in Tuesday at the New Orleans office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Officials detained all three. ICE is not supposed to do anything to USA citizens.

V.M.L.’s mother was allowed to talk with her father for only about one minute, not long enough for them to make substantive plans. ICE cut off the call when the father tried to give the mother a phone number for an attorney.

Thursday, lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition and motion for a temporary restraining order with the Western District of Louisiana on an emergency basis. He had been trying to contact the mother, but ICE refused to let them communicate. Court papers request the girl’s release to his sister-in-law Trish Mack, a USA citizen whom V.M.L.’s father asked to act as custodian and bring her home. The family’s lawyers said ICE told them it held the two year old as leverage to get the father to turn himself in. The lawyers did not specify his immigration status. The family and the sister-in-law’s family live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Lawyers for the regime assured the family’s counsel that a phone call for legal matters would be setup within 24 to 48 hours, and a separate call with a family member. Instead, just after court closed for the day, ICE told the family’s lawyers that deportation would occur at 06:00 the next morning.

Having not yet ruled on the habeas corpus petition or the request for a TRO, Doughty tried to investigate the matter himself on Friday. ICE had presented the court with a handwritten note in Spanish that they said showed V.M.L.’s mother wanted to take her along to Honduras. Doughty wanted to ask the mother by phone whether that was accurate. “The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her. But the Court doesn’t know that.”

Doughty was “independently aware” that the aircraft he believed was carrying V.M.L., her mother and her sister was already “above the Gulf of America.”

Lawyers for Donald Trump’s regime called Doughty that afternoon. They said he could not speak with the mother by phone “because she (and presumably VML) had just been released in Honduras,” Doughty wrote.

Doughty scheduled a hearing 16 May 2025 “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

Doughty is a Trump appointee who has issued a number of major decisions in favor of Donald Trump and his allies. Some conservatives intentionally file their lawsuits in his district in hope of having him assigned to their cases.

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