As part of Donald Trump‘s immigration crackdown, three U.S. citizen children were deported with their mothers by the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Friday morning. One of the children was undergoing cancer treatment and one of the mothers is pregnant.
Both families had lived in the country for years and had ties to their communities, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Louisiana, which warns that the circumstances of their sudden deportations raises grave due process concerns. The civil rights organization says that the first family was detained on Tuesday and the second family on Thursday, and that one of the mothers was given less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly dropped, after her spouse attempted to provide a phone number to legal counsel.
Among the children deported with their mothers, says the ACLU, are three U.S. citizens aged two, four, and seven. One of the children is a four-year-old suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer and was deported out of the country without medication or consultation with their treating physicians — despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s medical needs. The civil rights organization says that the mother of the two-year-old is pregnant, and was deported without ensuring any continuity of prenatal care or proper medical care.
“Once again, the government has used deceptive tactics to deny people their rights. These outrageous actions must be condemned. We as a nation are better than this,” said Alanah Odoms, the Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana. “These families deserve better. They must be returned.”
The two-year-old child’s deportation was covered widely Friday evening by media outlets, after the judge in the case demanded a hearing and wrote in a court filing that it appeared the Trump administration had “just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
PERCEPTION RESET 