In a chilling escalation of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics, three American children—infants of this nation, born on its soil and entitled to its protections—were forcibly deported to Honduras this week alongside their mothers.
Among them was a 4-year-old child battling Stage 4 cancer, ripped from medical care, and thrust onto a flight without access to life-saving medication or contact with their physicians.
The deportations, executed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during predawn hours Friday, mark a grotesque breach of constitutional rights and human dignity, raising urgent questions about the machinery of a system that expels its own citizens without due process.
White House border czar Tom Homan blamed the parents of the children, who sent to Honduras.
“If you enter this country illegally, it’s a crime,” said Homan, making a broad assumption that distorts the truth. “Knowing you’re in this country illegally, you put yourself in that position. You put your family in that position.”
While 8 U.S.C. § 1325 makes it a crime to enter the U.S. illegally, most undocumented immigrants initially came into the United States with a visa and overstayed their date of departure. At worst, that is a civil matter.
There is no law that allows the government to deport American citizens.
The families, complying with ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, had attended routine check-ins in New Orleans when agents detained them.
They were transported to a remote Louisiana facility, severed from legal counsel and relatives, then expelled to Honduras.
Lawyers for the families describe a harrowing ordeal: one father, whose 2-year-old daughter and partner were swept into custody, received a fleeting, monitored call before ICE severed contact entirely.
By sunrise, his child—a U.S. citizen by birth—was airborne, her fate sealed before courts could intervene.
U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee, later condemned the deportation as “illegal and unconstitutional,” noting the government’s reliance on contested claims of parental consent.
“The court doesn’t know that,” Doughty wrote, scheduling a hearing to probe his “strong suspicion” of constitutional violations.
Yet his order offered no remedy, leaving the child stranded abroad.
The Department of Justice defended the actions, asserting that undocumented mothers “opted” to take their citizen children with them—a choice lawyers argue was coerced under duress.
ICE prevented the mothers from consulting attorneys or co-parents during their detention, stripping them of agency in a moment of profound vulnerability. “We have no idea if consent was real or extracted through fear,” said Gracie Willis, an attorney for one father, who provided his daughter’s birth certificate proving her citizenship.
The government does not dispute the children’s status but hides behind bureaucratic procedure, dismissing the moral catastrophe of exiling sick children and shredding familial bonds.
Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, coldly remarked that it is “common” for parents to want removal with their children—a statement that ignores the coercion inherent in separating families or the legal obligation to protect citizens.
Meanwhile, the ACLU warns this is not an anomaly: ICE’s history of wrongful detentions and deportations of thousands of Americans since 2003 reveals a pattern of systemic abuse, unchecked by transparency or accountability.
As a nation grapples with this betrayal, the echoes of injustice grow louder: a toddler’s cry, a cancer patient’s whimper, the silenced voices of citizens discarded by their own government.
The Constitution, once a shield, now lies tattered—casualty of an enforcement regime that confuses cruelty with strength and forgets whose children it was sworn to protect.