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.
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