In the United States a judge barred the deportation of Guatemalan children

Translated by Celeste Valentini

During the night between the 30^th and the 31^st of August, a group of minors under the protection of the Office for Refugee Resettlement (ORR) – an agency who takes care and gives assistance to the unaccompanied children – was picked up and put on a non-stop flight to Guatemala. The procedure was stopped thanks to the timely intervention of the children’s lawyers and to an emergency order, that was issued around the 4 am of the 31^st of August bu the judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan.
According to Angie Salazar, the acting director of the ORR Agency, this operation is part of the “phase one” of a governmental plan to repatriate 327 Guatemalan unaccompanied children out of a total of 600-700 currently in the custody of the agency.

The lawsuit was filed by the National Immigration Law Center, a Ngo whose aim is to defend the migrants. This lawsuit includes 10 Guatemalan children between 10 and 17 years old, almost everyone with ongoing immigration processes. The vice-president of litigation for the Ngo called the court’s decision “a significant victory”.
The children’s lawyers underline how most of them have pending asylum claims or applications for international protection related to cases of abuse, neglect or abandonment. Around 30 of the 327 children awaiting repatriation are flagged in the ORR database as possible victims of abuse, human trafficking and gang violence.

The White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson declared that under the Biden Presidency hundreds of thousands of children were “victims of human smugglers who orphaned and abandoned them in America”. Similarly, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, called the judge’s decision “shameful and immoral” as well as a move to hit the President, as it prevents children from reuniting with their families.

At first the government declared that, in agreement with the Country of origin, the repatriation was intended to reunite the minors with their parents. However, the 18^th of September, during a preliminary injunction, the district judge Timothy Kelly, nominated by Trump himself, said that this explanation “crumbled like a house of cards”. There are no proofs that the children’s parents tried to reunite with them, also because of the difficulty to track the families down.

According to a memo cited by the senator Ron Wyden while the Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy was giving his testimony in front of the Senate Committee the last 4^th of September, the minors’ families didn’t expect their return. Among the testimonies, a parent declared that if their daughter had been sent back to Guatemala, they would have done everything possible to get her out of the country again, because of the death threats she received in the past.

The judge Timothy Kelly’s preliminary injunction bans all deportations first issued by the judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, who was appointed by Biden in 2024. The decision prohibits the Trump administration from repatriating unaccompanied Guatemalan children who have not received a final removal order or the permission from the Attorney General to return to Guatemala voluntarily.

Only in 2024, 31,621 unaccompanied children arrived in the United States from Guatemala, followed by Honduras, Mexico and El Salvador. According to the US law, the unaccompanied immigrants children who get to the borders of the United States have to be sent in refugees run by the federal government. Unlike adults who illegally cross the border, minors can’t be deported: they have to be transferred to reception centers run by the Department of Health and Human Services until they reach the age of majority or until they can be entrusted to a relative already residing in the Country, a sponsor or a foster family. This is a really delicate moment for the minor who wants to apply for asylum or emergency visas.

The arrival of hundreds of thousands of minors getting to the US borders every year highlights the friction between the US political and legal systems which is set to dominate the American debate for a long time to come.

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