Judge Blocks Mass Deportation of Children to Guatemala

Federal District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the government from deporting about 600 unaccompanied children to Guatemala in the small hours of Sunday morning on Labor Day Weekend.

The children reached the USA from Guatemala alone. The Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for taking care of them.

The government tried to fly 76 of them back to Guatemala without due process. They did not get notice or an opportunity to challenge deportation. For some, pending immigration proceedings were suddenly stopped.

Federal law does not allow expedited deportation of unaccompanied children and the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act grants extra protection for children seeking asylum. The government bypassed any attempt to get the required approval of an immigration judge before starting deportation of the children.

The National Immigration Law Center filed a lawsuit against it shortly after 01:00. Within half an hour they filed a request for emergency relief. Sooknanan was on duty as the emergency judge for the District Court over the holiday weekend and was called about the case at 02:36. Shortly after 04:00 she issued a temporary restraining order barring deportation of the initial 10 plaintiffs, and then she expanded her order to include all children in a similar situation who were not already subject to a formal removal order. The expanded order encompassed all 76 children already on airplanes and the approximately 600 children in total who were vulnerable to such an action.

Sooknanan scheduled a virtual hearing for 15:00 Sunday, then moved in up to 12:30 upon hearing that the government still had at least some of the children on airplanes poised to take off for Guatemala.

In the hearing, she said:

I got a call at 2:36 am because the government chose the wee hours of the morning on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend to execute a plan to move these children. That’s why we’re here. And I tried to reach the government. I have been up since then…and didn’t reach anyone from the government until later this morning. And the imminence that the plaintiff claimed proved true, because, in fact, those planes were loaded. One actually took off and was returned. And so, absent action and intervention by the court, all of those children would have been returned to Guatemala, potentially to extremely dangerous situations.

When government attorney Drew Ensign could not assure her that her expanded TRO had been disseminated to all government operatives who needed to know about it, she ordered a five minute recess for Ensign to take care of that.

She emphatically made Ensign state that the government understood and would comply with her full order. Ensign also represented the government in a case heard by Federal District Court Judge James Boasberg in which the government deported more than 200 men to Venezuela’s CECOT prison in defiance of Boasberg’s order not to do so. Sooknanan said, “These children are going to be deplaned. They’re going to be returned to ORR custody. And no attempts will be made to remove them from ORR custody and remove them to Guatemala, in light of my order, while these preliminary emergency proceedings are pending.”

The government claimed this is a pilot program in cooperation with the government of Guatemala and claimed the children wanted to go. NILC attorneys said at least some of the children were afraid of returning to Guatemala.

It took the government nearly 24 hours to get all the children off the airplanes and return them to appropriate custody.

Click here for more details.

Click here to read the lawsuit.