The Trump administration defended its move to deport three children who are US citizens over the weekend, arguing Monday that the decision was made by the parents, who were being deported as undocumented immigrants.
“If you remain in this country illegally, and you ignore a judge’s order about self-deporting, if you choose to have a US citizen child, knowing you’re in this country illegally, you put yourself in that position. You put your family in that position,” White House border czar Tom Homan told CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez during a White House press briefing this morning.
Three children who are US citizens were deported to Honduras with their mothers last week, including a 4-year-old receiving treatment for metastatic cancer, according to the families’ attorneys and civil rights and immigration advocacy organizations, as CNN has reported.
Homan said the administration removed the children because their mothers, who are undocumented immigrants, “requested” that their children stay with them rather than remain in the country.
“This is a parental decision. … Parenting 101, the mothers made that choice,” Homan said.
He said that if the children had stayed in the US, the administration would have been attacked for separating families.
“No — we’re keeping families together. So when a parent says, I want my two-year-old baby to go with me, we made that happen. They weren’t deported. We don’t deport US citizens. The parents made that decision, not the United States government,” Homan said.
But a Trump-appointed judge said Friday that the court does not know that this was a parental decision. The judge scheduled a May 16 court hearing in the case of one of the children, citing the need to resolve a strong suspicion that the government may have deported a US citizen without providing meaningful due process.
And the National Immigration Project executive director, Sirine Shebaya, said in a statement that ICE was “well aware before deporting the children that there were legal custodians and family members who were ready and willing to care for them” in the US, according to reports.
@cnn
White House border czar Tom Homan defended the Trump administration’s move to deport three US citizen children last week. Homan told CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez the children’s parents, who were in the US illegally, made a “parental decision” to leave the country together. Grace Willis, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, denies that the mothers were given a choice whether their children could remain in the US. #immigration #trump #deportations
♬ original sound – CNN
