A federal judge is warning that the Trump administration deported a two-year-old US citizen to Honduras without giving her a fair legal process. This happened while the child’s father was urgently asking the courts to keep her in the US.
US District Judge Terry Doughty, who was appointed by Trump, said the little girl — called “V.M.L.” in court documents — was released in Honduras earlier on Friday, along with her mother and sister, who are originally from Honduras and had been detained by immigration officials earlier that week.
The judge scheduled a hearing for May 16 to try to clear up the serious concern that the government deported a US citizen without proper legal steps.
The child’s US birth certificate, filed in court but with personal details hidden, showed she was born in New Orleans in 2023. She was with her mother and sister during a regular immigration check-in at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in New Orleans on Tuesday. Officials detained all three and started the process to deport them.
The Trump administration told the court that the mother told ICE she wanted to take her daughter, V.M.L., with her to Honduras. They showed a handwritten note in Spanish, which they said the mother wrote, to prove this. But Judge Doughty said he had wanted to check and confirm if that was true.
“The government says this is fine because the mother wants the child to go with her,” Doughty wrote. “But the court doesn’t actually know that.”
Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the mother chose to take the child with her. She explained that usually, parents are asked if they want to take their children with them when they are deported, or else ICE arranges for the children to stay with someone else the parent names. In this case, McLaughlin said, the mother chose to take her children.
She added, “We take protecting children very seriously and will keep working with federal law enforcement to make sure children are safe.”
The court fight started on Thursday when the family’s lawyers filed an emergency request in the Western District of Louisiana. They asked the court to immediately release V.M.L. from ICE custody and to rule that keeping her had been illegal. The request was filed by Trish Mack, who the lawyers said had been asked by V.M.L.’s father to take care of the child and bring her home.
The lawyers said that V.M.L.’s father had been trying to contact the mother to make plans for their child, but ICE didn’t let them have a real conversation. ICE only allowed a one-minute phone call on Tuesday, which wasn’t enough to make any important decisions about their child.
Since V.M.L. is a US citizen, she will probably be able to return to the U.S., making her case different from others in the news lately — like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man deported to a prison in his home country even though an immigration court had blocked his deportation in 2019. But this Louisiana case is another example of courts worrying that the Trump administration’s fast deportations are violating people’s rights — in this case, the rights of a U.S. citizen child.
Judge Doughty said he tried to look into the emergency matter himself on Friday. He tried to call V.M.L.’s mother to make sure that ICE’s story about her wishes was true. But by then, the plane carrying the family was already flying “above the Gulf of America,” Doughty said — a name he used instead of the more common “Gulf of Mexico.”
Later Friday, Trump administration lawyers told the judge that a phone call wasn’t possible anymore because the mother and children had already been released in Honduras. So Doughty set the May 16 hearing date.
Doughty is based in Monroe, Louisiana, which is about 100 miles north of Alexandria, where lawyers believed the mother and children were being held before they were deported.
It’s especially surprising that Doughty criticised the Trump administration so sharply because he had previously made several major rulings in favor of Trump and his supporters. For example, he sided with conservatives who challenged the Biden administration’s efforts to control misinformation about vaccines and other political issues on social media.
In fact, many conservatives thought Doughty would support them, and they sometimes filed lawsuits in his division to increase their chances of getting a favorable judge.
Even though Doughty made it clear he was upset with what happened, he still used the term “Gulf of America” for the Gulf of Mexico, which seemed like a small nod to Trump.
The Justice Department did not respond when asked for a comment.