A federal judge is demanding answers after the Trump administration apparently deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras “with no meaningful process.”
The toddler, identified in court documents as “VML,” was initially detained alongside her mother, Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela, and her older sister, Valeria, during a routine immigration check-in in New Orleans earlier this week, The New York Times reported. She’d been visiting the “Intensive Supervision Appearance Program” office, attorneys wrote, noting that Lopez Villela had been freed from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in 2021 under the same program.
When the father arrived at the ICE field office, officers gave him papers stating that the mother “was under their custody,” and that she “would call him soon.” That same day, an attorney for the family contacted ICE, informing them that VML was a U.S. citizen, according to an emergency petition in the Western District of Louisiana. The filing also included an emailed copy of the girl’s U.S. birth certificate sent to ICE.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said the girl was released in Honduras Friday afternoon alongside her mother, despite her father’s efforts. According to court documents, VML was born Baton Rouge, La., in January 2023.
“It is illegal and unconstitutional to deport, detain for deportation or recommend deportation of a U.S. citizen,” the judge said.
Trump administration officials said in court that the mother told ICE officials that she wished to retain custody of the girls and take them with her to Honduras, where she was born, Politico reported.
“The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” Doughty wrote. “But the Court doesn’t know that.”
Doughty said he tried to investigate the matter himself and attempted to reach out to Lopez Villela by phone around noon on Friday. By then, however, he noted, the plane he believed to be carrying the family was already “above the Gulf of America.”
The judge scheduled a hearing for May 19, “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
