A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to pull juvenile migrants off deportation flights Sunday, saying it appeared the government was trying to deport them without giving them their full right to challenge their ouster.
Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee to the court in Washington, D.C., moved quickly to shut down any flights after she said she learned the government seemed to be rushing to deport the children.
She also issued a broad restraining order on any more flights of unaccompanied alien children to Guatemala unless they have been all the way through the immigration process and received a final deportation order from the immigration courts.
“The court orders that the defendants cease any ongoing efforts to transfer, repatriate, remove, or otherwise facilitate the transport of any plaintiff or member of the putative class from the United States,” she wrote.
She also demanded deplaning of migrants she believed to be on airplanes ready to be flown out.
A little after 6 p.m., Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign told the judge all children had been deplaned and were being sent from Homeland Security custody back to Health and Human Services, which is generally responsible for holding UACs.
Mr. Ensign said all of the juveniles should be back with HHS by the end of the day.
Lawyers for 10 Guatemalan juveniles had told the court the children were being targeted for speedy deportations even though they are still battling their cases.
They filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all Guatemalan UACs — those who were without parents at the time they came to the U.S. as juveniles — who are in government custody and who don’t have a final order of deportation lodged against them.
The case was filed early Sunday and has quickly turned into the next major deportation battle of the Trump administration, with immigrant rights advocates hailing Judge Sooknanan’s quick intervention.
“Many of these children fled violence, trafficking, abuse, persecution, and other grave harm in Guatemala and fear return to these same dangers,” said Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense.
UACs are among the trickiest immigration cases. By definition, they don’t have parents with them when they show up at the border.
Under the law, those from Canada or Mexico can be quickly repatriated as long as there are no immediate trafficking or asylum concerns, but those from farther afield are treated differently.
They are to be transferred from Homeland Security to the Health and Human Services Department, where they are held in government-run shelters while HHS tries to find sponsors to house them, while they argue whether they should be allowed to stay.
The Biden administration unleashed a tidal wave of minors, swamping the system and leading to horrifying abuses such as children being trafficked, lost to gangs, or otherwise lost in the system.
Some UACs went on to be implicated in horrific crimes, such as the migrant convicted of murdering Kayla Hamilton in Maryland in 2022.
Others, though, are the most desperate of victims, either coming on their own or sent by a parent who decided they would be better off elsewhere. Some of the plaintiff children described those situations in filings with Judge Sooknanan.
One 10-year-old said their mother is dead and their father “does not take good care of me.” That child said they came to the U.S. because of “abuse, neglect and family violence” back home.
“If I am sent back, I will not be able to live safely. I won’t have anyone to protect me,” the child said.
Another girl, 16, said she was here with her 10-month-old daughter. She said she faced neglect by her own parents and the baby was “abandoned by her father.”
She said she hoped to win release to a sponsor who would take in the two of them.
The lawyers for the children argued the Trump administration was breaking the law, which they said requires that the migrants go through a full immigration court process before facing deportation. They also argued the deportations violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause because only Guatemalan children were involved.
The Trump administration has taken steps to limit some of the UAC abuses of the Biden years, with new safeguards to limit the children’s release and with more checks on would-be sponsors.
It has also slashed the flow of migrant minors.
As of July, there were just eight new UACs being referred to HHS a day, down from more than 350 a day during 2022, the peak Biden year.