A federal judge in Arizona temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to deport close to 70 unaccompanied minors from Honduras and Guatemala on Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez granted a preliminary injunction preventing “the repatriation or removal of any Plaintiff Child without a valid voluntary departure order or removal order issued by an immigration judge.”
She criticized the government’s argument that it was sending the children back to reunite them with their parents, writing it was “dangerously unclear” whether the plan would realize this outcome.
“The foundation of Defendants’ argument for their authority to transport Plaintiffs out of the United States is that Defendants are reuniting Plaintiff Children with parents abroad, but counsel could not identify a single instance of coordination between a parent and any government—American or Guatemalan,” Márquez wrote.
“Altogether, whether Plaintiffs would actually be reunited with a parent upon being transported out of the United States is dangerously unclear,” she continued.
She wrote that while the government insisted that Guatemalan officials had requested the return of the children in the case, a report from Guatemala’s attorney general found many of the families of 115 adolescents in the U.S. did not do so.
“Fifty families stated that they would accept their children upon their return, but ‘with the caveat that none of them was requesting their return, indicating their desire to consider first the viability of the children staying in the United States,’” Márquez wrote.
Another 59 families, she continued, “expressed annoyance at being contacted and were not willing to be assessed to determine their suitability as a home for their children.”
Márquez previously issued a temporary restraining order over Labor Day weekend, preventing the government from removing 57 children from Guatemala and 12 from Honduras.
A case similar to this one in Arizona unfolded in D.C.’s federal court, with a federal judge blocking the Trump administration’s plans to deport unaccompanied Guatemalan children last week.
In the case, the Trump administration also argued that it aimed to reunite children with their parents by sending them back — an argument U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly found unconvincing.
“While Defendants plunged ahead in the middle of the night with their ‘reunification’ plan and then represented to a judge that a parent or guardian had requested each child’s return, that turned out not to be true,” Kelly wrote.
