Four-year-old child with rare cancer ‘deported despite being a US citizen’

Protests are being held over the deportations (Picture: Luis Santana/Tampa Bay Times/ZUM)

The Trump government has been accused of wrongly deporting a young US citizen with cancer.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have deported mothers and children from three families, and three children involved are US citizens, their lawyers say.

A four-year-old, who is suffering with a rare form of cancer, and a seven-year-old sibling were deported to Honduras with a day of being arrested with their Honduras-born mother.

In another case, a two-year-old girl and her mother was deported with her pregnant mother and 11-year-old Honduran-born sister to Honduras.

And in Florida, a Cuban-born woman who is mother of a one-year-old girl and the wife of a US citizen has also been deported, separating her from her daughter who is still breastfeeding.

The case comes as a battle in the federal courts over whether President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has gone too far and moved too quickly.

A demonstration outside Milwaukee County Circuit after Judge Hannah Dugan was charged for allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest (Picture: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Lawyers say the three women were arrested at routine check-ins at ICE offices, given virtually no opportunity to speak to lawyers or their families, and all deported in fewer than three days.

The mothers weren’t given a fair opportunity to decide whether their children should remain in the US or not, it is alleged.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), National Immigration Project and several other allied groups said in a statement that the way ICE deported children who are US citizens and their mothers is a ‘shocking — although increasingly common — abuse of power’.

Gracie Willis, from the National Immigration Project, said: ‘We have no idea what ICE was telling them, and in this case what has come to light is that ICE didn’t give them another alternative.

‘They didn’t gave them a choice, that these mothers only had the option to take their children with them despite loving caregivers being available in the United States to keep them here.’

Protests against Trump’s immigration crackdown have been held (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

In the case involving the 2-year-old, a federal judge in Louisiana raised questions about the deportation of the girl, saying the government did not prove it had done so properly.

US District Judge Terry Doughty scheduled a court hearing on May 16 ‘in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process’.

Lawyers for the girl’s father insisted he wanted the girl to remain with him in the US, while ICE contended the mother had wanted the girl to be deported with her to Honduras – claims that hadn’t been fully vetted by Judge Doughty.

Meanwhile, the father’s lawyers said ICE had indicated it was holding his two-year-old daughter to try and induce him to turn himself in.

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