Secretary of State Marco Rubio denied claims that three minor U.S. citizens, all under ten years old – and one with stage IV cancer, were deported without due process, calling the accusations “misleading.”
The Washington Post reported that three American citizens from two different families, aged two, four and seven, were deported along with their mothers from a Louisiana facility on Friday. The report alleged that the four-year-old child is suffering from stage-4 cancer and that the mother had no way of contacting their doctors, according to the family’s lawyer. Rubio pushed back against the claims that the children were deported, instead asserting that the children’s mothers, who were not in the country legally, opted to take their children with them.
“That’s a misleading headline. Three U.S. citizens, aged 4, 7 and 2 were not deported. Their mothers were legally deported, and the children went with their mothers. They can come back to their father or someone who wants to assume them. Ultimately, it was the mothers who were here illegally. You guys make it sound like ICE kicked down the door and grabbed the child and threw them on an airplane, and it’s misleading and that is not true,” Rubio said.
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Trump appointee U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, however, did not believe the federal government’s claims that the children were not in fact deported. In response to an emergency order filed Thursday night by the father of the two-year-old girl, the judge issued an order expressing his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.” The toddler had accompanied her mother to an immigration meeting that would allow her to remain in their community called an Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, the family’s lawyers claimed.
“The government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her, but the court doesn’t know that,” Doughty wrote.
The family’s lawyers say the girl’s father was only able to speak to her mother for one minute before their phone call was abruptly ended by ICE agents, and the girl was shipped off to Honduras with her mother the following morning.
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Rubio remained firm that the only targets for deportations were the mothers in the US illegally, and that the children would be welcome to return if their fathers or another suitable guardian were to assume responsibility for them.
“If someone is in this country unlawfully, illegally that person gets deported. If that person is with a 2-year-old child and says I want to take my child with me, then you have two choices. You can say yes, of course, you can take your child whether they’re a citizen or not, because it is your child. Or 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,” Rubio said.
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