Deporting Americans?

Over the past week, President Trump has shown us what mass deportations look like.

His administration sent three American children from two different families to Honduras along with their undocumented mothers on Friday. One of the kids, a 4-year-old boy, is in the fourth stage of a rare form of cancer.

As Trump ramps up deportations, more sympathetic cases like these are likely to pop up. Trump wants to deport all undocumented immigrants. Some of them are genuine criminals who have done awful things while staying in the United States illegally. Most of them are not. They are people who came to this country looking for work or fleeing horrible conditions back home. They might be pregnant, as one of the deported moms is, or ill or parents of U.S. citizens. Still, they are undocumented, so they’re on Trump’s deportation list.

The administration says that it has a mandate to carry out campaign promises and restore law and order. Most Americans, however, believe that only some unauthorized migrants should be deported, polling suggests.

In the cases of the three American children, the courts may get a say.

Avoiding separation

Officials detained the families during routine check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The authorities took the mothers and their children — 2, 4 and 7 years old — hours away from the site of their appointments in New Orleans, the families’ lawyers said. Within days, they were gone. The lawyers couldn’t reach the mothers until after they arrived in Honduras.

A Trump-appointed federal judge, Terry Doughty, issued a brief order in the case of the 2-year-old on Friday, setting a hearing to get more information. The 2-year-old’s father reportedly said that he wanted his daughter to remain in the United States. Doughty said that he had a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

The administration insists that it didn’t deport U.S. citizens. Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said that officials gave the mother of the 2-year-old a choice to leave her child in the United States or take the girl to Honduras. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the kids, but not the mom, could come back if their father or someone else took them.