Judge suspects 2-year-old U.S. citizen deported ‘with no meaningful process’

A federal judge in Louisiana expressed concern Friday that the Trump administration had deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras “with no meaningful process” and against the wishes of her father.

In a brief order issued from U.S. District Court in the Western District of Louisiana, Judge Terry A. Doughty questioned why the administration had sent the child – known in court papers only as V.M.L. – to Honduras with her mother even though her father had sought in an emergency petition Thursday to stop the girl from being sent abroad.

“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” wrote Doughty, a conservative Trump appointee. “But the court doesn’t know that.”

Asserting that “it is illegal and unconstitutional to deport” a U.S. citizen, Doughty set a hearing for May 16 to explore his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

The V.M.L. case, which was reported earlier by Politico, is the latest challenge to the legality of several aspects of President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation efforts.

The administration has already been blocked by six federal judges in courts across the country from removing Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members to El Salvador under a rarely invoked wartime statute. It has also created an uproar by wrongfully deporting a Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador and so far refusing to work to bring him back.

According to court papers, the 2-year-old girl had accompanied her mother, Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela, and her older sister, Valeria, to an immigration appointment in New Orleans on Tuesday when they were taken into custody by officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Lopez Villela was scheduled for an expedited removal from the country Friday. And in a filing to Doughty, lawyers for the Justice Department claimed that she “made known to ICE officials that she wanted to retain custody of V.M.L. and for V.M.L. to go” with her to Honduras.

But in a petition filed by the child’s custodian, Trish Mack, on Thursday, her father claimed that when he spoke briefly with Lopez Villela, he could hear her and the children crying. The father reminded her, the petition said, that “their daughter was a U.S. citizen and could not be deported.”

The father, who was not identified by name in the petition, tried to give Lopez Villela the phone number for a lawyer, but he claims that officials cut short the call.

The detention of V.M.L. “is without any basis in law and violates her fundamental due process rights,” the petition said. “She seeks this court’s urgent action and asks the court to order her immediate release to her custodian Trish Mack, who is ready and waiting to take her home.”

Doughty said in his order that he tried to investigate what had happened himself by trying to get Lopez Villela on the phone Friday shortly after noon to “survey her consent and custodial rights.”

Doughty expressed concern that a plane carrying the mother and her daughters was by then already “above the Gulf of America.” His suspicions were confirmed, he wrote, when a lawyer for the Justice Department told him at 1:06 p.m. that day that Lopez Villela and presumably her children “had just been released in Honduras.”

The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.