HHS Discovers ONE WEIRD TRICK To Disappear Immigrant Children

The trick is to break the law. Again.

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Last weekend, the Trump administration tried to shove 76 Guatemalan children on planes and deport them in the dead of night. Thanks to the heroic efforts of Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the US District Court in the District of Columbia, who was serving as the duty judge for emergency petitions, they failed. This weekend they tried to explain to Judge Timothy Kelly why this secret deportation plot was totally legal, irrespective of several laws saying it was anything but.

“This case is uncomplicated, both legally and morally: where possible, unaccompanied alien children should be reunited with their parents or guardians,” the Justice Department blustered in its opposition to the plaintiffs motion for preliminary injunction. “Their continued separation is a tragedy to be cured, not prolonged as Plaintiffs request classwide, regardless of a specific child’s best interests.”

It’s a breathtakingly craven position. The government lies about the facts of the case in order to affect a posture of moral indignation — and then uses that false righteousness as cover for ignoring the plain language of the law.

The government argues that the Department of Health and Human Services’s (HHS) mandate to “reunify” unaccompanied alien children with their parents allows it summarily load children onto planes and deport them. HHS has never claimed to possess such authority, and no court has ever recognized it.

Now the question is whether Judge Kelly, a Trump appointee, and the Supreme Court’s howler monkeys will let them get away with it.

Who you gonna believe?

In court last weekend, DOJ lawyer Drew Ensign told Judge Sooknanan that, “The Government of Guatemala has requested the return of these children, and all of these children have their parents or guardians in Guatemala who are requesting their return.”

The DOJ continued to make that claim this week, insisting that sneaking the kids out of the country in the middle of the night with no notice to their lawyers was part of a long, deliberative process in which each child’s interest was dutifully considered:

HHS reviewed each child’s case in order to make individualized determinations whether, for certain children from Guatemala, reunification with their parents was in each child’s best interests. It then acted, in cooperation with the government of Guatemala, to reunify qualifying children with their parents without through years of removal proceedings before returning them to their parents. For each child HHS seeks to reunify with his or her parents in Guatemala, HHS has determined that the child does not have a credible fear claim or pending asylum case; has received assurances that the child will not be trafficked upon return to Guatemala; has determined that the child does not have indications of being a victim of trafficking or of abuse or neglect by a parent or guardian; and has not received an affirmative protest of the child’s reunification with a parent in Guatemala from the child’s attorney of record.

This is belied by dozens of affidavits attesting that the children have pending asylum claims, fear being trafficked or harmed if sent to Guatemala, and do not wish to be repatriated. Many of those affidavits also document child abuse, neglect, sexual and physical abuse, and prior trafficking and gang victimization.