In the early hours of Aug. 31, ICE agents and contractors woke up dozens of Guatemalan children from the shelters where they were sleeping and put them on buses headed to an airport in Texas. Most of the children were put on planes to be flown back to Guatemala, from which they had come to the U.S., unaccompanied by parents or other adults.
The National Immigration Law Center filed a class action lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and many other members of President Donald Trump’s government, to keep the children in the U.S. The 10 child plaintiffs named in the class action lawsuit by their initials only, ranged in age from 10 to 17 years old.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Hilda Bonilla, an attorney and Legal Fellow with the National Immigration Law Center, who describes the drama that unfolded on the airport tarmac as the Department of Homeland Security attempted to deport these Guatemalan children out of the country.
HILDA BONILLA: What happened this weekend with Guatemalan children should truly shock the conscience of all Americans because vulnerable kids were woken up in the middle of the night to be removed to a country where they may face abuse, neglect, persecution. NILC started to hear reports about the administration’s plans on Friday, Aug. 29, and we immediately got into action trying to draft legal papers to try to stop the removals from happening in the middle of the night. On Saturday, Aug. 30, we started hearing reports that kids were being transferred to airports and put in planes to be removed, so we filed a complaint at 1 in the morning, and after that, we filed a temporary restraining order at about maybe one 1:30 that ended up being granted at 4:22 a.m.
HILDA BONILLA: We have a few declarations in which either parents saying that they didn’t request for their children to be removed from the United States. And we have some other statements in the children’s declarations saying that their parents were surprised to hear that they were being removed. In addition to that, some of the children have pending immigration cases, pending asylum claims. We have a few, or at least one that was granted a special immigrant juvenile status, which basically means that according to the United States, the U.S. decided that it was not safe for them to go back to their home country.
MELINDA TUHUS: In these cases, were there also children who were sort of fleeing their own families because of abuse? Is that part of the story here?
HILDA BONILLA: Yes. Yes. There were children that reported that they either had a deceased parent or that their parents were abusive towards them, that they had no one to go back to and that they would definitely not be safe if they were returned to Guatemala.
MELINDA TUHUS: Where are the children now? Where did they get returned to?
HILDA BONILLA: They are in the Office of Refugee Resettlement custody, which is what is supposed to happen by law. They are in ORR shelters now. For right now, what is in place is the temporary restraining order that the judge granted at around noon on Sunday, Aug. 31. That temporary restraining order is in place until Sept. 14.
Right now, currently we are briefing what is called a preliminary injunction and the judge will have to issue a new ruling after the 14 days are up on that preliminary injunction and decide whether to extend the protection for the Guatemalan children or to modify it.
I would just like to highlight the cruelty of pulling children out of their beds in the middle of the night. The attorneys also reported that the children were very confused and very scared, and that one girl was so scared that she started vomiting. So I think we just can’t underestimate the trauma of what these children went through that night.
MELINDA TUHUS: I was curious if the administration is trying to recruit hundreds apparently of military lawyers to help with this huge backlog of immigration cases, but they don’t have to have — and almost all cases don’t have — any experience with immigration law. What do you think about that?
HILDA BONILLA: I think you flagged what the major concern is here, and that is that immigration law is notoriously complex. JAGs (Military attorneys or justice advocates) are likely to have very little to no background in immigration law, which raises serious concerns about how they’ll make determinations in the life and death cases that will come before them. So totally, totally concerned about just how cases will be adjudicated.
For more information, visit the National Immigration Law Center website at nilc.org.
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