Lawyers challenge deportation of hundreds of minors to Guatemala

The migrants' attorneys said their clients, who ranged from 10 to 17 years old, were at imminent risk of removal despite some having pending asylum cases or other legal claims that had not fully been vetted by the courts.

The attorneys said trafficking and immigration laws "prevent unaccompanied children from being whisked off under cover of darkness at the whim of any government." The minors in question are currently in Health and Human Services custody and have no legal guardians in the United States, the attorneys said.

The migrants' legal team is now seeking a longer-term injunction to replace Judge Sparkle Sooknanan's emergency order over the holiday weekend blocking the deportations for up to two weeks. Sooknanan granted the order after learning that more than six dozen of the minors had been transferred from HHS to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody overnight and placed on a plane bound for Guatemala. 

The case has drawn attention both because it involves what lawyers say could be about 600 minors at risk of being abruptly removed from the country and because Sooknanan, the judge initially presiding over the case, imposed an immediate restraining order on the Trump administration to halt the removals.

Sooknanan's order came after a separate judge in D.C. gave a controversial oral order in March to return alleged Tren de Aragua gang members to the United States, which the Trump administration argued was ambiguous and not binding. Seeking to avoid such a dispute, Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, left no room for interpretation.

The lawsuit was brought by 10 underage Guatemalan migrants who were living in the country without a guardian or documentation. Their attorneys described them in court papers as "vulnerable children" entitled to "enhanced protection and care." The attorneys said the Trump administration was blowing past laws and the Constitution in an effort to illegally deport them.

Sooknanan granted a class action lawsuit so that the case would cover not just the 10 plaintiffs but all other minors similarly situated in the custody of HHS.

After Labor Day, the case was reassigned to Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee. Kelly has set a hearing for next week over the migrants' new request for a preliminary injunction.

The migrants' attorneys said they had learned from media reports that ICE was planning to "imminently" deport them to Guatemala, where they "may face abuse, neglect, persecution, or even torture."

Federal authorities "woke children in the night and subjected them to the trauma of imminent removal," the attorneys wrote in court papers.

"But for this Court's intervention while the plane sat on the tarmac in Texas, those children would have been expelled to Guatemala," they said.

A DOJ lawyer told the judge during the last-minute hearings over the weekend that the Guatemalan government had requested the return of the migrant youths and that "all of these children have their parents or guardians in Guatemala who are requesting their return."

"Judge Sparkle [Sooknanan] is blocking flights to *reunify* Guatemalan children with their families," DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin wrote. "Now these children have to go to shelters. This is disgusting and immoral."