MEXICO CITY — The family of a 2-year-old U.S. citizen who was sent to Honduras along with her mother was told on Tuesday by their lawyers that they would no longer be suing the Trump government.
The girl, one of three U.S.-born children deported with their Honduran-born moms, was at the centre of one of the growing legal battles in the U.S. that was trying to figure out if the Trump administration broke the law when it put its new deportation policies into place.
A family lawyer, Gracie Willis, said, “Because the families have been through so many traumatic events, they are taking a step back to talk about all of their options, the safety and well-being of their children, and the best ways to move forward so that the harms they have suffered can be fully addressed.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Immigration Project, and a few other groups working together filed the lawsuit. They said the deportations were a “shocking, but increasingly common, abuse of power.”
A group of lawyers and Willis said that the families did not have a fair chance to choose if they wanted the children to stay in the United States. Willis said that the girl’s family and lawyers agreed to drop the case so that the family could have “space and time to think about all the options that are available to them.”
A federal judge in Louisiana had doubts about the girl’s removal because the government couldn’t show that it had done it correctly.
The pregnant Honduran mother was arrested in April on an open deportation order along with the girl and her Honduran sister, who is 11 years old, while they were at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in New Orleans for a check-in, police said. They lived in Baton Rouge.
Lawyers for the girl’s father said he wanted the girl to stay in the U.S. with him, but ICE said the girl’s mother wanted to send her back to Honduras with her.
Lawyers for the father said in court that ICE told them that they were keeping the girl to get the father to turn himself in.
The case was set to be heard later this week by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in Louisiana. He said this was “to dispel our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”