The undocumented migrant mothers of three US-born children, including a cancer patient, are shocked and traumatized after the US deported them to Honduras, their lawyers said on Monday.
The expulsions last week from the southern state of Louisiana come as US President Donald Trump takes a hard-line approach to migration.
Jenny Lopez Villela was deported on Friday last week with her two-year-old daughter, while another, unnamed woman was sent back with her four and seven-year-old children, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Immigration Project (NIP).
Photo: Reuters
The ACLU said the four-year-old has “a rare form of metastatic cancer” and was flown home without medication or medical consultations.
Lopez, who is pregnant, also has an 11-year-old daughter born in Honduras who was on the deportation flight with her.
The children’s fathers remained in the US.
“Both families are going through very difficult times” and “are trying to figure out how they will recover, what steps they will take,” Lopez’s attorney Mich Gonzalez said.
Michelle Mendez, an attorney at the NIP, described the situation as “quite tragic” and said the families have been through “trauma.”
Tom Homan, Trump’s point man on border security, told reporters at the White House on Monday that the children were not deported and it was their mothers’ decision to take them with them to Honduras.
“If you choose to have a US citizen child knowing you’re in this country illegally, you put yourself in that position. You put your family in that position. What we did is remove children with their mothers who requested the children depart with them. This is a parenting decision... The mothers made that choice,” he said.
Honduran Vice Chancellor Antonio Garcia said that the government was investigating the matter.
Honduran President Xiomara Castro “is concerned about this situation ... of separating families. We want due process to be respected,” he said.
A federal judge in Louisiana has scheduled a hearing for May 16 into the case of Lopez’s two-year-old daughter “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process.”
The girl’s father had filed an emergency request for a temporary restraining order to obtain her return.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
YELLOW SHIRTS: Many protesters were associated with pro-royalist groups that had previously supported the ouster of Paetongtarn’s father, Thaksin, in 2006 Protesters rallied on Saturday in the Thai capital to demand the resignation of court-suspended Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and in support of the armed forces following a violent border dispute with Cambodia that killed more than three dozen people and displaced more than 260,000. Gathered at Bangkok’s Victory Monument despite soaring temperatures, many sang patriotic songs and listened to speeches denouncing Paetongtarn and her father, former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and voiced their backing of the country’s army, which has always retained substantial power in the Southeast Asian country. Police said there were about 2,000 protesters by mid-afternoon, although
RSS