HARLINGEN, Texas (AP) — After the U.S. government loaded children onto planes overnight to be sent back to their native Guatemala, a federal judge temporarily blocked the flights — with the youngsters still inside — as their attorneys said authorities were violating U.S. laws and sending vulnerable kids into potential peril.
The extraordinary drama played out over predawn hours on a U.S. holiday weekend and vaulted from tarmacs in Texas to a courtroom in Washington. It was the latest showdown over the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration — and the latest high-stakes clash between the administration's enforcement efforts and legal safeguards that Congress created for vulnerable migrants.
For now, hundreds of Guatemalan children who arrived unaccompanied will stay while the legal fight plays out over coming weeks.
“I do not want there to be any ambiguity,” said Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, who noted her ruling applies broadly to Guatemalan minors who arrived in the U.S. without parents or guardians.
Minutes after she concluded a hastily scheduled hearing Sunday afternoon, five charter buses pulled up to a plane parked at the border-area airport in Harlingen, Texas. Hours earlier, authorities had walked dozens of passengers — perhaps 50 — toward the plane in a part of the airport restricted to government planes, including deportation flights. The passengers were wearing colored clothing that is used in government-run shelters for migrant children.
The U.S. government insists it's reuniting the Guatemalan children with parents or guardians who sought their return. Lawyers for at least some of the minors say that's nonsense and argue that in any event, authorities still would have to follow a legal process that they did not.
One girl said her parents, in Guatemala, got a strange phone call a few weeks ago saying the U.S. was deporting her, said one of the attorneys, Efrén C. Olivares of the National Immigration Law Center. Other children — identified only by their initials — said in court documents that they had been neglected, abandoned, physically threatened or abused in their home country.
Sunday's court hearing came in a case filed in federal court in Washington, but similar legal actions also were filed elsewhere.
In a lawsuit in Arizona, the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project said one of its clients is a 12-year-old asylum-seeker who has chronic kidney disease, needs dialysis to stay alive and will need a kidney transplant. Two other plaintiffs, a 10-year-old boy and his 3-year-old sister, don't have family in Guatemala and don't want to return, according to the group.
Families scramble to Guatemalan air base
As the developments played out in the U.S., families gathered at an air base in Guatemala’s capital, Guatemala City, in anticipation of the flights. Gilberto López said he drove through the night from his remote town after his 17-year-old nephew called at midnight, saying that he was being deported from Texas.
The boy left Guatemala two years ago, at age 15, to work in the U.S. and was detained about a month ago, López said.
Alarm bells for immigrant advocates
Migrant children who arrive in the U.S. without their parents or guardians are routinely handed over to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement. They often live in government-supervised shelters or with foster care families until they can be released to a sponsor — usually a relative — living in the country.
Many of those from Guatemala request asylum or pursue other legal avenues to get permission to stay the U.S.
An attorney with the National Center for Youth Law said the organization starting hearing a few weeks ago from legal service providers that Homeland Security Investigations agents were interviewing children — particularly Guatemalans — in facilities of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
The agents asked the children about their relatives in Guatemala, said the attorney, Becky Wolozin.
Then, on Friday, advocates began getting word that their young clients’ immigration court hearings were being canceled, Wolozin said.
Shaina Aber of Acacia Center for Justice, an immigrant legal defense group, said it was notified Saturday evening that officials had drafted a list of children to return to Guatemala. Advocates learned that the flights would leave from the Texas cities of Harlingen and El Paso, Aber said.
It's unclear whether any planes actually departed. Government lawyer Drew Ensign told the Washington judge that one plane might have taken off but then returned.
The Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and HHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday.
The judge said that after being awakened at 2:30 a.m. to address the emergency filing from the children's lawyers, she spent hours trying to reach federal attorneys and get answers.
“I have the government attempting to remove unaccompanied minors from the country in the wee hours of the morning on a holiday weekend, which is surprising,” Sooknanan said at the hearing, later adding: “Absent action by the courts, all of those children would have been returned to Guatemala, potentially to very dangerous situations.”
The rapid-fire developments resembled a March weekend showdown over the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. Advocates implored a federal judge to halt deportations they believed were imminent, while the Trump administration was mum about its plans.
That judge appeared in civilian clothes for a Saturday night hearing and tried to block the flights, but they went ahead, with the government saying the order came too late.
Trump administration plans to remove nearly 700 Guatemalan children
The Trump administration is planning to remove nearly 700 Guatemalan children who came to the U.S. unaccompanied, according to a letter sent Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat. The Guatemalan government has said it's ready to take them in.
It is another step in the Trump administration's sweeping immigration enforcement efforts, which include plans to send a surge of officers to Chicago for an immigration crackdown, ramping up deportations and ending protections for people who have had permission to live and work in the United States.
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Santana reported from Washington and Peltz from New York. Associated Press writers Sonia Pérez D. in Guatemala City and Corey Williams in Detroit contributed.
Valerie Gonzalez, Rebecca Santana And Jennifer Peltz, The Associated Press
