WASHINGTON — White House border czar Tom Homan on Monday blamed the parents of U.S. citizen children the Trump administration sent to Honduras over the weekend.
At a Monday morning press conference, Homan defended the government’s actions to remove three young children from two different families alongside their mothers who were in the country without legal authorization but participated in a program that allows otherwise law-abiding migrants to stay in their communities.
“If you enter this country illegally, it’s a crime,” Homan said. “Knowing you’re in this country illegally, you put yourself in that position. You put your family in that position.”
The children, all under the age of 10, were placed on deportation flights to Honduras on Friday after their mothers checked in with a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in New Orleans as part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which allows immigrants to stay in their communities while undergoing immigration court proceedings.
An attorney for one of the children, Gracie Willis at the National Immigration Project, said the 4-year-old U.S. citizen with Stage 4 cancer was deported without access to his medication.
Homan has argued the mothers requested to be deported with their children, but attorneys for the families argue they were “denied access to legal counsel, and swiftly deported without due process.”
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, whom Trump appointed to a seat on the Louisiana federal bench in 2018, expressed concern that a 2-year-old U.S. citizen had been deported, despite her father’s wishes she remain in the U.S., according to court filings.
Doughty scheduled a May 16 hearing because of his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
“The government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” Doughty wrote in his order. “But the court doesn’t know that.”
Willis, from the National Immigration Project, raised concerns about a lack of due process and how the deportations have separated families.
“What we saw from ICE over the last several days is horrifying and baffling,” she said in a statement. “These mothers had no opportunity to speak with their co-parents to make the kinds of choices that parents are entitled to make for their children, the kinds of decisions that millions of parents make every day: ‘what is best for our child?’”
Homan has argued the children were deported at the request of the mothers and that the Trump administration was “keeping families together.”
“What we did is remove children with their mothers who requested their children depart with them,” he said. “When a parent says, ‘I want my 2-year-old baby to go with me,’ we made that happen. They weren’t deported. We don’t deport U.S. citizens. The parents made that decision, not the United States government.”
Monday’s remarks from Homan come the day before President Donald Trump will mark the 100th day of his second term. His early days in office have centered on carrying out his campaign promise of mass deportations of millions of people in the U.S. without permanent legal status.
Trump will sign two executive orders on immigration late Monday: one relating to border security and another to require the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to publicly list so-called sanctuary cities that do not coordinate with federal immigration law enforcement.
Homan also stood by the Trump administration’s decision to arrest a federal judge in Wisconsin on the grounds she obstructed immigration officials from detaining a man attending his court hearing. It marked an escalation between the Trump administration and the judiciary branch, raising concerns from Democrats.
The arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan was highly publicized after she was handcuffed in public and FBI Director Kash Patel bragged about the arrest on social media.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Fox News that the Trump administration was going to continue to go after judges who “think they’re above the law.”
“When you cross that line to impediment or knowingly harboring, concealing an illegal alien from ICE, you will be prosecuted, judge or not,” Homan said.