Fearing the Trump administration is aiming to repeat an aborted effort to remove dozens of Guatemalan children from the United States, lawyers and shelter workers across the country are scrambling to prevent the government from gathering Honduran children in their custody and deporting them to their home countries.
Legal aid groups believe federal immigration authorities, with the Honduran government’s support, are preparing to remove children from Honduras who arrived in the United States without a parent or guardian and are now in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Homeland Security investigators and representatives from the Honduran consulate met with several Honduran children at an Arizona shelter in recent weeks, and immigration court cases for Honduran children have suddenly disappeared, according to aid groups.
The moves follow a “similar pattern” that the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project witnessed in the cases of Guatemalan children before the government tried to abruptly remove them without a court hearing — sparking a dramatic, fast-paced legal battle detailed in dozens of harrowing court statements from the children themselves.
“It is truly astounding that the government is moving forward with this plan after they tried to do the same thing to children from Guatemala in the dead of night over Labor Day weekend,” Florence Project deputy director Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu said in a statement.
A federal judge has temporarily blocked Immigration and Customs Enforcement from deporting targeted Guatemalan children, and the Florence Project has joined the lawsuit to preemptively block the government from similarly removing a dozen Honduran children.
“The only difference between the children from Guatemala protected by those temporary restraining orders and the children from Honduras who are being targeted is their country of origin, and existing laws protecting unaccompanied minors applies to all migrant children in the government’s care,” Avila-Cimpeanu said.
“The blatant disrespect for the basic rule of law that the government is displaying towards these children shocks the conscience,” she added.
The Independent has requested comment from Homeland Security and the Honduran consulate.
At least one child from Honduras who attended an immigration court hearing in August was asked by the judge whether they want to voluntarily return to their home country, “explaining that the child’s name was on a list that the judge had been provided,” according to attorneys.
Aimee Korolev, deputy director of the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project, said more than a dozen cases involving Honduran children have since been abruptly wiped from immigration court dockets.
At least 19 cases suddenly had “no future hearing,” according to Korolev.
“I am worried that the removal of the hearings from the court docket is a signal that these children could face imminent removal,” she wrote in court documents.
On September 1, the Honduran government announced that it began to initiate “coordinated efforts for institutional cooperation in order to ensure a safe return of the minors deported from the United States.”
Officials there are working to “address situations like the one experienced in Guatemala, with the deportation of unaccompanied minors from the United States on flights,” according to Guadalupe Sandoval, Director of the General Directorate for the Protection of Hondurans.
Laura Smith is executive director of the Children’s Legal Center, which represents unaccompanied minors in five ORR facilities in Illinois and Indiana, including two facilities contracted with the National Youth Advocacy Center.
On September 4, Smith received an email from a National Youth Advocacy Center ORR facility in Illinois informing her that an ORR program officer alerted the facility that “ICE may soon be taking into custody minors from the country of Honduras with the intent to repatriate them to their home country.”
She received a similar message the following day from another facility.
That same day, a legal services provider in Texas said she received an anonymous phone call from a staff member at a shelter that houses unaccompanied children.
Estrella de El Paso attorney Natasha Halina Rosario said the anonymous staff member indicated that the government was planning “to repatriate all children under the ORR custody without making any announcement.”
The staffer said that the government was “attacking” all unaccompanied migrant children, not only those from Guatemala, according to Rosario.
Another legal service provider for unaccompanied children in Texas had also been notified by a different program that Honduran children in ORR custody “may face imminent removal” from the country.
The Trump administration had not obtained legal permission to remove dozens of Guatemalan children this month, according to their lawyers. Their families in Guatemala were not seeking their return, and testimony from children said they were not trying to get back.
But at least 76 children were already on planes and sitting on a tarmac as they waited for a judge’s response to a lawsuit to keep them in the country.
The children remain in federal custody while yet another high-profile legal challenge to the president’s anti-immigration agenda continues.
In court documents supporting a request to block their removal, more than a dozen Guatemalan teenagers described their overwhelming fear of returning to their home country.
They describe childhoods in neglect, threats of extortion and gang violence against them or their families, and returning to homes or government shelters where they were abused or trafficked.
“The administration’s position that it was merely cooperating with the Guatemalan government to return children to their parents is belied by the facts,” attorneys for Guatemalan children wrote in court filings.
“Even if the administration’s contentions regarding its coordination with the Guatemalan government are true, any such coordination does not excuse the government’s illegal action and does nothing to change its obligation to provide unaccompanied minors with the process unambiguously due to them under the law,” they added.
