HARLINGEN, TEXAS (AP) – With migrant children waiting for asphalt to be sent to their native Guatemala, a federal court blocked the flights on Sunday, opted for the lawyers for the children who said the government was violating laws and send their clients to potential danger.
The extraordinary drama took place at night during a holiday weekend and vaulted from Asphalt in Texas to a courtroom in Washington. It was the last confrontation with the action of the Trump government against immigration – and the last collision between the enforcement efforts of the administration and legal guarantees that the congress has established for vulnerable migrants.
Guatemaltie children who have arrived at the border without their parents or guardians will stay at least two weeks according to the ruling, while the legal fight unfolds.
“I don’t want there to be any ambiguity,” said American district judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan.
Minutes after her hastily planned hearing, five charter buses went to a plane at Valley International Airport in Harlingen, Texas, a hub for deportation flights. Hours earlier the authorities had walked dozens of passengers – perhaps 50 – to the plane in an area that was limited to government aircraft. Passengers wore colored clothing that was usually used in the government -run hiding places for migrant children.
“This idea that they would wake up these vulnerable children on a long weekend in the middle of the night and put them in a plane, regardless of the constitutional protection they had, something that the conscience of all Americans should shock,” said Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, that the children represents after hearing Sunday.
The Homeland Security department did not immediately respond to a request for comments on the ruling.
The chaotic, fast -fire developments seemed to be on a weekend weeks about the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans To a prison of maximum security in El Salvador. Proponents begged a federal judge to stop deportations that they were on their hands, while the Trump government was silent about its plans.
In that case, the judge appeared in civil clothing for a Saturday evening hearing and tried to block the flights, but they continued, the government told that the judicial order was too late.
The administration insisted that it reunited the Guatemalteek children – at the request of the Central – American nation – with parents or guardians who were looking for their return. Lawyers for at least a few children say that that is not true and claim that the authorities should in any case still follow a legal process that they did not.
A girl said her parents in Guatemala received a strange phone call a few weeks ago and say that the US deported her, said one of the plaintiff lawyers, Efrén C. Olivares.
The 16-year-old, who lived in a hiding place in New York, said in a court that she is a Honors student who is about to start 11th class, likes to live in the US and “is afraid to be deported”.
Other children – only identified by their initials – said in judicial documents that they had been neglected, abandoned, physically threatened or abused in their home country.
“I don’t have a family in Guatemala who can take good care of me,” said a 10-year-old in a court. A 16-year-old remembered that he experienced ‘threats against my life’ in Guatemala.
“When I am sent back, I believe I will be in danger,” the teenager added.
Sunday’s hearing came in a case that was submitted to the federal court in Washington, but similar legal actions were also submitted elsewhere.
In a lawsuit in Arizona, the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project said that one of her clients is a 12-year-old asylum seeker who has chronic kidney disease, needs dialysis to stay alive and needs a kidney transplantation. Two other claimants, a 10-year-old boy and his 3-year-old sister, have no family in Guatemala and do not want to return, according to the group.
While the developments took place in the US, families gathered at an airbase in the capital of Guatemala, Guatemala City, pending flights. Gilberto López said he drove out of his remote city through the night after his 17-year-old cousin called at midnight to say he was deported from Texas.
The boy left Guatemala two years ago, at the age of 15, to work in the US and was held about a month ago, López said.
Alarm bells for proponents of immigrants
Migrant children who arrive in the US without their parents or guardians are routinely transferred to the resettlement of the Ministry of Health and Human Services. They often live in hiding places guided by the government or with foster care families until they can be released to a sponsor-masters a family member-in the US.
Many of those from Guatemala Request asylum Or pursue other legal ways to get permission to stay.
A lawyer at the National Center for Youth Law said that a few weeks ago the organization started to hear from legal service providers that agents of the domestic security studies – in particular Guatemalans – interviewed in facilities of refugees resettlement.
The agents asked the children about their relatives in Guatemala, said the lawyer, Becky Wolozin.
When, on Friday, proponents began to say that the hearings of the immigration of their young clients were canceled, Wolozin said.
Shaina Aber of Acacia Center for Justice, a legal defense group for immigrants, said it was informed on Saturday evening that civil servants had drawn up a list of children to return to Guatemala. Proponents learned that the flights would leave the Texas cities of Harlingen and El Paso, Aber said.
The government had two planes on site in Harlingen and one in El Paso, Texas, Olivares said, based on witness reports. Government lawyer Drew Ensign told the judge that one aircraft might have left but returned.
Witte Huis Deputy Stephen Miller said on X that the Guatemaltekse Government formally asked the return of the children and that the judge “refused to have them reunited with their parents.”
Judge received a call from 2:30 am
The judge said that she was awakened at 2:30 am to tackle the emergency request from the children’s lawyers, who wrote in a daring type that flights may leave within the following two to four hours. Sooknanan has spent hours to reach federal lawyers and to get answers, she said.
“I have the government that does not try to remove it -in the early hours of the morning during a holiday weekend, which is surprising,” Sooknanan said during the afternoon hearing and later added: “absent action by the courts, all those children would have been sent back to Guatemala, potentially for very dangerous situations.”
The Trump government is Plan to remove nearly 700 Guatemalteek children Who did not come to the US, according to a letter sent on Friday by Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat.
At the end of Sunday, the government of Guatemala said in a statement that she had originally presented the transfer of minors to the American domestic security secretary Kristi Name during her visit to the country in July. The concern of Guatemala was that hundreds of minors quickly agree from the youth facilities where they were held and sent to adult detention centers. It emphasized that it was ready to receive the minors when the appropriate process was completed in the American following determined protocols.
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Santana reported from Washington and Peltz from New York. Associated Press Writers Sonia Pérez D. in Guatemala City and Corey Williams in Detroit have contributed.
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