Hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children can stay in the U.S. for now, judge says

A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from expelling hundreds of Guatemalan children who crossed the U.S. border alone. Although the government had not obtained legal permission to remove the children, some of their lawyers said, Guatemalan children were already loaded on planes on a tarmac while the judge conducted a hearing about the situation on Sunday, a U.S. attorney confirmed.

The temporary halt, issued Sunday afternoon, allows lawyers 14 more days to discuss the case and prevents any children from being removed during the next two weeks.

The children the U.S. intended to remove were under the care of the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. Since 2002, the Department of Health and Human Services has been required by federal law to shelter and care for children who enter the U.S. without parents or guardians.

After HHS assumes care of unaccompanied children, following their apprehension by other agencies at the border, the minors are typically not allowed to be deported without receiving the benefit of full immigration proceedings. Even in some circumstances where it is possible for unaccompanied children to be reunited with guardians in their home countries, they must still first undergo a legal process that allows the children to defend themselves and the U.S. government to confirm that the return would be in the best interest of the children, said Becky Wolozin, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, a nonprofit that has been working on the case with other groups.

But this weekend, “no one had advance notice that this was happening,” Wolozin said, referring to the plan by the U.S. government to deport hundreds of Guatemalan children with little warning.

“On just a baseline, you want the person on the other end to know when to pick them up,” Wolozin said. “This was an enormously rushed, middle-of-the-night operation.”

After learning that the U.S. government was planning to quickly remove as many as 600 Guatemalan children under the care of HHS before allowing the children to have their cases heard in court, following reporting on Aug. 29 by CNN, attorneys for the children requested on Sunday morning that a District Judge, Justice Sparkle Sooknanan, issue a Temporary Restraining Order to prevent the children’s removal.

During the hearing, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation, Drew Ensign, told Justice Sooknanan that planes containing Guatemalan children were on the ground ready for takeoff, and that one of them might have already taken off and turned back around.

Ensign also told Justice Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, that the Guatemalan government had requested the return of the children to their home country and that all the children’s parents had requested their removal from the U.S.

NPR asked the Government of Guatemala to comment but did not immediately hear back. The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NPR.

Lawyers for some of the children contested that their clients’ guardians were all aware and in agreement with the plans to send the minors to Guatemala. In a document filed on Aug. 31, attorneys at the National Immigration Law Center said the U.S did not notify the children ahead of time that they were going to be removed and that doing so would deprive them of their legal right to pursue asylum in the U.S.

By sending the children to Guatemala as planned, the U.S. government could be putting the children at risk of “abuse, neglect, persecution, or torture,” attornies for the children wrote in a petition filed on Sunday.

Wolozin said it was a relief that Justice Sooknanan temporarily prevented the removals of the children to Guatemala.

“The government is trying to spin this as child protection, but it’s not, it’s child abuse,” said Wolozin. “It wasn’t orderly, it skipped all of the procedural protections.”

In a statement issued on Sunday evening, the National Immigration Law Center said they intend to continue fighting to protect the Guatemalan children. 

“In the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala,” said Efrén Olivares, a lead attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. “We are heartened the Court prevented this injustice from occurring before hundreds of children suffered irreparable harm.”