'No meaningful process': Trump-appointed judge slams deportation of 2 year-old US citizen

An American-born toddler was recently deported to Honduras with her mother, prompting one judge appointed by President Donald Trump to express alarm over the administration's sloppy handling of the case.

Politico's Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein reported Friday that U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty — who Trump appointed to the Western District of Louisiana in 2018 — has now scheduled a May 16 hearing to discuss the deportation of the two year-old U.S. citizen referred to in court papers as "V.M.L." Doughty wrote in the scheduling order that the hearing was necessary "in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process."

V.M.L., whose birth certificate shows she was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2023, was deported to Honduras with her mother and sister despite her father's repeated attempts to ask the court to keep her in the United States. When V.M.L.'s mother and sister were taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials following a Tuesday check-in at ICE's New Orleans office, the toddler's mother handed officials a handwritten note in Spanish expressing her wish that her baby come with her to Honduras.

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“The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” Doughty wrote in the Friday scheduling order. “But the Court doesn’t know that.”

VML's father asked a woman named Trish Mack to act as V.M.L.'s legal custodian in order to get the toddler released from ICE custody. However, Mack's attorneys said that ICE agents only allowed the girl's mother one minute to discuss arrangements with V.M.L.'s father and that the two were unable to put a plan together before the call ended.

"Respondents have no legal authority to detain V.M.L., as she is a natural-born U.S. citizen and a toddler," attorneys wrote on behalf of Mack in a Thursday filing.

Judge Doughty said he had become "independently aware" that the plane carrying V.M.L. and her mother and sister was already in the air above the Gulf of Mexico as he tried to reach V.M.L.'s mother by phone to confirm her wishes for her two year-old daughter. Doughty even used the Trump administration's preferred term for the body of water in his order.

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Click here to read Politico's full report.