Secretary of State Marco Rubio has rejected the notion that the U.S. government is deporting its own citizens, even as children as young as two years old have been sent out of the country.
The administration is instead deporting their mothers, who choose to take their children with them, Rubio argued Sunday.
Rubio appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, defending the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts, which have included the removal of at least three U.S. citizen children, aged two, four, and seven. They were sent out of the country with their mothers.
“Their mothers, who were illegally in this country, were deported. The children went with their mothers,” Rubio said.
“If those children are U.S. citizens, they can come back into the United States if … their father or someone here … wants to assume them,” he added. “But, ultimately, who was deported was their mother, their mothers who were here illegally. The children just went with their mothers.”
The secretary slammed the allegations as “misleading,” arguing that press coverage of their removals “sound like ICE agents kicked down the door and grabbed the two-year-old and threw him on an airplane.”
“That’s just not true,” he said.
Deported mothers weren’t given the chance to contact their attorneys during their time in custody in the U.S., lawyers said.
While Rubio defended the Trump administration’s efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, he also said that all people in the U.S., citizens and noncitizens alike, are “of course” entitled to due process.
The two-year-old child, identified in court filings as V.M.L., had been detained along with her mother during a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement this week. They were swiftly sent to Honduras.
The family’s lawyers told a judge that the child’s father has been attempting to contact the child’s mother, but ICE officials blocked him from having a substantive phone call.
Trump administration lawyers claimed that the mother wanted to bring her child with her.
The judge, however, said he had wanted to verify that.
“The Government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” Trump-appointed judge Terry Doughty said. “But the Court doesn’t know that.”
Gracie Willis of the National Immigration Project called ICE’s actions “horrifying and baffling.”
“We should be gravely concerned that ICE has been given tacit approval to both detain and deport U.S. citizen children despite the availability and willingness of U.S.-based caregivers who, only because of ICE’s own actions, cannot find or contact them,” she said in a statement.
Meanwhile, White House border czar Tom Homan told Face the Nation on CBS that he is unaware of last week’s case of a mother who had entered the U.S. illegally and was deported to Honduras along with her four-year-old child with stage four cancer.
“Having a U.S. citizen child after you enter this country illegally is not a get out of jail free card,” Homan said Sunday. “It doesn’t make you immune from our laws.”
The secretary and the border czar addressed Sunday news programs amid the Trump administration’s efforts to push the courts to allow quick deportations of immigrants, including alleged members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua, which Trump labeled “alien enemies” who can be summarily deported under his use of the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to go ahead with some deportations under the Alien Enemies Act as long as those being deported “receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal” under the wartime law.
They must be allowed to challenge their removal in courts with the jurisdictions where they are imprisoned, the justices said.
During his appearance on Meet the Press in December as the president-elect, Trump said his mass deportation efforts would likely be applied to families of mixed status, including families with citizens.
“I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back,” Trump said at the time.
Rubio defended the administration’s efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, arguing on Sunday that it was part of leaving behind decades of policy that allowed undocumented immigrants to stay in the United States while their asylum claims were processed.
“Once you come into our country illegally, it triggers all kinds of rights that can keep you here indefinitely,” he said. “That’s why we were being flooded at the border, and we’ve ended that.”
