{"id":135350,"date":"2025-04-28T01:41:29","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T01:41:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/2-year-old-u-s-citizen-apparently-removed-from-the-country-with-no-meaningful-process-judge-says-nbc-news\/"},"modified":"2025-04-28T01:41:29","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T01:41:29","slug":"2-year-old-u-s-citizen-apparently-removed-from-the-country-with-no-meaningful-process-judge-says-nbc-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/2-year-old-u-s-citizen-apparently-removed-from-the-country-with-no-meaningful-process-judge-says-nbc-news\/","title":{"rendered":"2-year-old U.S. citizen apparently removed from the country 'with no meaningful process,' judge says – NBC News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Profile
Sections
Local
tv
Featured
More From NBC
Follow NBC News
news Alerts
There are no new alerts at this time
A federal judge in Louisiana on Friday said that a 2-year-old U.S. citizen appears to have been taken with her mother to Honduras with no meaningful due process.
In an order scheduling a hearing for next month, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty wrote that the child was sent to Honduras on Friday with her mother, who had been ordered to be removed.
\u201cThe Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,\u201d Doughty wrote. \u201cBut the Court doesn\u2019t know<\/em> that.\u201d
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the “parent made the decision to take the child with them to Honduras,” adding that “it is common that parents want to be removed with their children.\u201d
Mich P. Gonz\u00e1lez, who is representing the mother in the case and is the co-founder of Sanctuary of the South, an immigration and LGBTQ civil rights cooperative, said that was not the case in a phone interview Saturday night.
\u201cICE is mischaracterizing that this was her wish,\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez said. \u201cThis woman was held in an undisclosed hotel.\u201d
Gonz\u00e1lez added that the woman is pregnant and that ICE prevented her from talking to her lawyers or anyone in her family to make arrangements.
The Louisiana court called a government lawyer at 12:19 p.m. local time to speak with the child\u2019s mother, while the plane was in the air, and was called back at 1:06 p.m. and told that mother and child were already in Honduras, Doughty wrote.
Doughty wrote that the May 16 hearing was \u201cIn the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.\u201d
Doughty, chief judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017 and confirmed by the Senate the next year.
The mother and her two daughters, including the U.S. citizen who is identified as VML in court documents, were seized Tuesday morning in New Orleans by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the woman went to a scheduled meeting with the agency, lawyers opposing the deportation wrote.
The family was checking in with an \u201cIntensive Supervision Appearance Program\u201d office, the attorneys wrote. The mother, from Honduras, had been freed from ICE detention in 2021 under that program, they wrote.
\u201cDuring the approximate three days they held her with her children, cut off from family and counsel, ICE made her feel threatened and coerced into accepting the deportation under duress,\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez said.
The father of VML, who lives in the U.S., sought custody of VML after the mother was detained this week and asked that the girl be placed with a custodian who is \u201cready and willing\u201d to care for her in the U.S., attorneys for the custodian wrote.
VML was born in Baton Rouge on Jan. 4, 2023, and is a U.S. citizen, the attorneys with the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild wrote. The other child is 11 years old and was born in Honduras.
Attorneys who sought to stop the child\u2019s removal argued that removing her violates the Constitution and her rights as a U.S. citizen.
Lawyers for the government said that the child\u2019s mother has legal custody of the child and that she indicated in a letter she would take her daughter to Honduras.
The letter, in Spanish, reads, \u201cI will take my daughter … with me to Honduras.\u201d
An image of the handwritten letter is dated Thursday at 6:23 p.m., when the woman and child were in ICE custody and before they were removed Friday.
\u201cThey submitted a document that they claim shows our client\u2019s consent to all of this,” Gonz\u00e1lez said. “That document is a hand-written note that essentially states that her child would be leaving with her to Honduras, and it\u2019s clear that the part that is blacked out is that it\u2019s written in hotel stationary.”
Phil Helsel is a reporter for NBC News.
Joe Kottke is an assignment editor at NBC News covering domestic news, including natural disasters, LGBTQ issues and politics.
Carmen Sesin is a reporter for NBC News based in Miami, Florida.
© 2025 NBCUniversal Media, LLC<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ProfileSectionsLocaltvFeaturedMore From NBCFollow NBC News news AlertsThere are no new alerts at this timeA federal judge in Louisiana on Friday said that a 2-year-old U.S. citizen appears to have been taken with her mother to Honduras with no meaningful due process.In an order scheduling a hearing for next month, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty wrote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":135351,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}