Trump’s Mass Deportation Campaign Comes After American Children

Apr 27, 2025

The Washington Post provides an overview of U.S. citizens caught up in Trump’s deportations. His administration’s determination to eliminate all due process for deportations has led to some particular egregious cases, including forcible expulsion of U.S. citizen children.

The Post has another report on that:

Three U.S. citizen children from two different families were deported with their mothers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the early hours of Friday morning. One of them is a 4-year-old with Stage 4 cancer who was deported without medication or the ability to contact their doctors, the family’s lawyer said.
According to their lawyers, both families were taken into custody while attending routine check-ins this week in New Orleans as part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which allows individuals to remain in their communities while undergoing immigration proceedings. Lawyers say the families were taken to Alexandria, Louisiana, a three-hour drive from New Orleans, where they were prevented from communicating with their family members and legal representatives and then put on a flight to Honduras.
The cases have renewed concerns that the Trump administration’s expedited deportations are violating the due process rights of both citizens and noncitizens. …
Hours after the deportation, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee, issued an order expressing his concern that the girl had been deported against her father’s wishes while stressing it is “illegal and unconstitutional” to deport U.S. citizens.

Immigration enforcement has been used to create a lawless police state that would supposedly only target illegal immigrants. But its very lawlessness guarantees that this police state inevitably targets citizens, too.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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