The US flew three children who were American citizens out of the country and to Honduras with their mothers last week. But were those children "deported?" Depends on whom you ask.
- "No US citizen child was deported," insisted border czar Tom Homan on CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday, per the Washington Post. "Deported means ordered by an immigration judge."
- "Who paid for the ticket? It is clear that the US government paid for this ticket—that means these children were deported," counters Charles Kuck, an immigration attorney and professor at Emory University. "Whether they had [due] process or not, whether ICE appropriately followed the rules or not, these children were deported. The question you have to ask yourself is: What's stopping this from happening to me and my kids?"
The controversy revolves around two families who lived in Louisiana. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained the two undocumented mothers before flying them to Honduras, reports the New York Times. One mother had a 2-year-old girl, and the other mother had children ages 4 and 7. All three children were born in the US and thus have American citizenship, and all three accompanied their mothers to Honduras. One extra wrinkle is that the 4-year-old has been undergoing treatment for metastatic cancer, notes CNN.
Lawyers for the families say they were not given enough time to make alternative arrangements, and the father of the 2-year-old says he wanted the child to remain with him in the US. A judge has scheduled a hearing in that case. Homan defended ICE's actions, asserting that having a child in the US "is not a get-out-of-jail-free card" for undocumented immigrants. On NBC's Meet the Press, Secretary of State Marco Rubio also faulted the parents involved for the children's predicament. "If those children are US citizens, they can come back into the United States if their father or someone here … wants to assume them." (More deportation stories.)
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