Trump officials defend deportations involving U.S. citizen children
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President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House last week. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Trump administration officials on Sunday defended the administration's aggressive crackdown on undocumented immigrants after immigration advocacy groups reported U.S. citizen children had been deported.
The big picture: Both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Trump's border czar Tom Homan in Sunday TV interviews denied the children, who were sent with their mothers from Louisiana to Honduras, had been deported.
Context: National Immigration Project said on Friday the New Orleans ICE Field Office "deported at least two families, including two mothers and their minor children — three of whom are U.S. citizen children aged 2, 4, and 7."
- One of the mothers is pregnant and one child with "a rare form of metastatic cancer was deported without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians — despite ICE being notified in advance of the child's urgent medical needs," per the NIPNLG.
What they're saying: Rubio said on NBC News' "Meet The Press" it was the "mothers, who are illegally in this country," who were deported.
- "The children went with their mothers. Those children are U.S. citizens. They can come back into the United States if there's their father or someone here who wants to assume them," he said.
- "If someone is in this country unlawfully, illegally, that person gets deported. If that person is with a 2-year-old child or has a 2-year-old child and says, I want to take my child ... with me, well, then what? You have two choices," he said.
- "You can say yes, of course you can take your child, whether they're a citizen or not, because it's your child; or you can say yes, you can go, but your child must stay behind. And then your headlines would read: 'U.S. holding hostage 2-year-old, 4-year-old, 7-year-old, while mother deported."
Homan said on CBS News' "Face The Nation" that "children aren't deported."
- He added: "The mother chose to take the children with her — when you enter the country illegally, and you know you're here illegally, and you choose to have a U.S. citizen child, that's on you. That's not on this administration."
- CBS' Margaret Brennan noted a Trump-appointed judge said Friday a 2-year-old U.S. citizen was sent with their deported mother to Honduras "with no meaningful process."
- Homan said he disagreed with the judge and "that female had due process at great taxpayer expense."
The other side: National Immigration Project executive director Sirine Shebaya in an emailed statement Sunday evening called statements that the children weren't deported "willfully misleading."
- Shebaya said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were "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 U.S.
- "They did not offer either of the mothers any alternatives to having their children deported with them," Shebaya said.
- Both families "made multiple requests for the U.S. citizen children to be released to caregivers and those requests were denied" and they and attorneys had requests to speak to the mothers denied.
- "The mothers were held incommunicado, in complete isolation and without the ability to speak with anyone in order to make arrangements for their children to stay here," Shebaya added.
- "The mothers also had legal options available to them that they could have pursued had they been given an opportunity to do so. What began as a routine check-in turned into yet another senseless deportation and family separation."
- Representatives for ICE and the State Department did not immediately respond to Axios' requests for comment in the evening.
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