The children, 4 and 7, were put on a plane with their mother, who was deported. The family’s lawyer said the mother was given no choice but to take her children, which the Trump administration denied.
A 4-year-old and a 7-year-old with U.S. citizenship were deported alongside their mother to Honduras last week, the family’s lawyer said, adding to the recent string of American citizens caught in the cross hairs of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The children and their mother were put on a flight to Honduras on Friday, the same day another child with U.S. citizenship, a 2-year-old girl, was sent to that country with her undocumented mother.
Lawyers for both families said the mothers were not given an option to leave their children in the United States before they were deported. In the case of the 2-year-old, whose 11-year-old sibling was also sent to Honduras, a federal judge in Louisiana expressed concern that the administration had deported the American child against the wishes of her father, who remained in the country.
But President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, denied that any American child was deported. Speaking about the 2-year-old’s case on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Mr. Homan said that federal immigration agents gave her mother a choice of whether to be deported with or without her child, and that she had left the country with her daughter at her discretion.
The children are from two different families who were living in Louisiana. The mother of the 2-year-old is pregnant, and the 4-year-old, a boy, has a rare form of late-stage cancer, the families’ lawyers said. They said the boy had no access to his medications or his doctors while he was in custody with his 7-year-old sister and mother.
The moves come as the Trump administration has ramped up its immigration enforcement and mass deportation efforts. In Florida last week, nearly 800 immigrants were arrested in an operation involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and state law enforcement officials.
