According to court documents obtained by CBS News, a 2-year-old Louisiana girl and US citizen may have been deported to Honduras this week with her mother and 11-year-old sister without proper due process.
In an order Friday, Judge Terry Doughty, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, wrote that there was a “strong suspicion that the Government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process.”
When Doughty, who was appointed to the bench by President Trump during his first term, attempted to arrange a phone call with the girl’s mother on Friday afternoon, Justice Department lawyers informed him that such a call “would not be possible because she (and presumably VML) had just been released in Honduras.” Court documents identify the girl as VML.
The immigration status of the girl’s father, mother, and sister was unknown. The girl was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in January 2023, according to the filing.
“The parent decided to take the child with them to Honduras. “It is common for parents to want to be removed with their children,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told CBS News on Saturday.
According to a petition filed Thursday by Trish Mack, a friend of the child’s mother, the girl, her 11-year-old sister, and mother were detained Tuesday morning while visiting an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in New Orleans for a routine check-in. The mother had been attending similar meetings on a regular basis for four years, frequently accompanied by her daughters. According to the petition, the girl’s father took them to the meeting.
After being detained, the mother and her two daughters were taken to an ICE field office in New Orleans, according to court documents. When the father arrived at the office, ICE officers handed him papers stating that the mother “was under their custody,” and that she “would call him soon.”
That day, the family’s attorney contacted ICE and informed authorities that the girl was a US citizen, according to the petition, and emailed a copy of the girl’s US birth certificate to ICE.
But that night, an ICE agent called the father and told him that “they were going to deport his partner and daughters,” according to the documents.
In an effort to halt the deportation of his two daughters, the father filed for a temporary transfer of legal custody on Tuesday, which would give custody of both to his sister-in-law, a US citizen living in Baton Rouge under Louisiana law.
On Wednesday, an ICE agent spoke with the family’s attorney and “refused to honor a request to release” the girl “to her custodian, stating that it was not needed because” she “was already with her mother,” court documents state.
The ICE agent also stated that the “father could try to pick her up, but he would also be taken into custody.”
Doughty has scheduled a hearing for May 16 in this case.
Since beginning his second term in January, President Trump has pursued an aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration, sparking a flurry of lawsuits and raising questions about whether it violates federal law.
The Trump administration is under fire for the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who the Justice Department admitted was mistakenly deported to El Salvador last month.
Despite a Supreme Court ruling requiring the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, Mr. Trump said in an interview published Friday in Time magazine that he has not contacted Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to do so.