Deporting the Cancer Kid

What do you do with U.S. citizen children when a noncitizen parent is deported? The Trump administration has so far answered this question by saying, Well, actually, it's not much of a question at all, hurry up and deport them already, let's not ask any questions or consult any lawyers.

Terry Doughty, a U.S. district judge in Louisiana, says that a 2-year-old U.S. citizen was deported with her pregnant mother to Honduras. "Lawyers representing the father of the 2-year-old U.S. citizen who was deported, identified as V.M.L. in court documents, filed an emergency petition in the Western District of Louisiana on Thursday seeking her release," reports The Washington Post. "The child was put on a plane to Honduras the next morning before the court opened."

Doughty, who President Donald Trump appointed, issued an order expressing his fear that the toddler had been deported against her father's wishes, noting that it is "illegal and unconstitutional" to deport U.S. citizens. "The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her. But the Court doesn't know that," wrote the judge. "Seeking the path of least resistance, the Court called counsel for the Government at 12:19 p.m. CST, so that we could speak with VML's mother and survey her consent and custodial rights. The Court was independently aware at the time that the plane, tail number N570TA, was above the Gulf of America. The Court was then called back by counsel for the Government at 1:06 p.m. CST, informing the Court that a call with VML's mother would not be possible, because she (and presumably VML) had just been released in Honduras." A hearing is set for May 16 due to the judge's "strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process."

Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin subsequently declared that the "parent made the decision to take the child with them to Honduras," adding that "it is common that parents want to be removed with their children." Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allegedly prevented the woman from speaking with her lawyers or making arrangements with family members for the care of the child, notifying the father that both mother and child had been taken into ICE custody but denying him information about the whereabouts of his child. The mother "was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel's phone number," according to attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Doughty's sharp criticism of the Trump administration is particularly notable because he issued a series of major decisions in favor of Trump and his allies in recent years, most notably backing conservatives in legal challenges to the Biden administration's efforts to rein in what it claimed was misinformation on social media platforms about vaccines and certain politically charged topics," reports Politico. This reminds me a bit of when the Fourth Circuit rebuked the government's actions in carrying out Kilmar Abrego Garcia's deportation, with J. Harvie Wilkinson—who, as Glenn Greenwald told me last week, "has long been considered kind of the model of a great right-wing conservative judge"—writing the opinion.

Another similar case: Two other U.S. citizen children were deported to Honduras with their illegal immigrant mother, denying the 4-year-old child—who has metastatic cancer—access to his medication.

Gracie Willis, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, told NBC that the boy with cancer and his 7-year-old sister were detained on Thursday; taken to El Paso, Texas; and flown to Honduras on Friday morning.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when asked about this over the weekend, called the media coverage "misleading," telling Meet the Press "you guys make it sound like ICE agents kicked down the door and grabbed the 2-year-old and threw him on an airplane."

"Their mothers, who were illegally in this country, were deported. The children went with their mothers," Rubio continued. "If those children are U.S. citizens, they can come back into the United States if there's their father or someone here who wants to assume them. But ultimately, who was deported was their mother, their mothers who were here illegally. The children just went with their mothers."

The issue, which Rubio did not grapple with, is that the deported mothers not have sufficient access to attorneys or family members to make arrangements for the care of minor children. This runs contra ICE's own policies, "which mandate coordination for the care of minor children with willing caretakers—regardless of immigration status—when deportations are being carried out," per the ACLU.

And all of this contradicts the administration's official line: "If you look at the manifest of these flights of people that are being deported, these are some of the most vile human beings imaginable that we're getting out of our country—sex offenders, rapists, killers," said Rubio. "That's who we're prioritizing being sent out." This is not true. They're sending out the pregnant mother of a 2-year-old and the mother of a child with advanced cancer. It is true that these women are in this country illegally, and thus may well be deportable. But the government hasn't shown us any evidence that these moms are "the most vile human beings imaginable" or Tren de Aragua members or linked to MS-13 or people with criminal records at all.

Rubio and Trump and the rest expect us to be gullible. It would be more honest for them to just say: We will deport as many people as we can, and do it quickly as a show of force, to signal that we're serious.

Trump has ruminated on these issues in the past: "I don't want to be breaking up families," he told Meet the Press back in December, "so the only way you don't break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back."

Scenes from New York: "Mayoral candidate Jessica Ramos wants to manage the city's $112 billion budget, but she's failed to get her own fiscal house in order—defaulting on nearly $80,000 in student loans," reports The New York Post. "Two filings in Queens state supreme court from 2019 show that Ramos, a state senator from the borough, defaulted on a pair of loans: one for $35,757.21 and the other for $42,550.25."

QUICK HITS

• "Intellectual and journalistic communities where friends aren't allowed to criticize friends quickly rot from the inside," writes Jesse Singal on his Substack, referring to Bari Weiss' interview with Rubio in which she declined to press the secretary of state on deportations. "If anyone else had published this interview, I would have criticized it, and I don't like the idea of declining to do so just because I like Bari," he adds. "She just let Rubio distance himself from these deportations without any pushback. That isn't a properly journalistic way to interview an exceptionally powerful man making exceptionally consequential decisions about the lives of faraway people who have no say in the matter."
• Speaking of Rubio: He has indicated that President Trump will decide this week on whether to keep pursuing a Ukraine-Russia settlement agreement and what that might look like.
• "Arrivals of ships carrying automobiles in April was down 36%," reports The Seattle Times, drawing on data from the Marine Exchange of Puget Sound. And "the number of container vessels arriving or departing from Seattle and Tacoma between April 1 and April 15 was down around 27% compared with the first half of March and by around 24% from April 1–15, 2024." Given shipping lag times, the full effect won't be felt until May.
• The West Alabama Women's Center was once the only abortion provider in that region of the state. Now it provides free car seats, clothes, formula, and diapers to women in need, and it plans to convert an old abortion recovery room into a birthing center, where poor women can deliver their babies in the presence of midwives and doulas who will attend to them. They do pop-up events in rural areas offering ultrasounds and blood pressure checks, and they provide a host of other pregnancy-care services to low-income women in the state. My pro-life views are showing, but what an incredible improvement.
• A reason to scrap Pell Grants?

25% of community college applicants in California are now AI bots.

Scammers enroll the bots in online courses long enough to get money from the Pell Grant system.

Welcome to the future. https://t.co/atDcnQmN4z pic.twitter.com/V6IjxTsxLB

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) April 26, 2025

• In case you missed it: