By Mariana Alfaro · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s border czar, insisted Sunday that the Trump administration did not “deport” American children to Honduras – arguing that the White House sent the children to the country because their mothers, who were being deported, wished to bring them.
Early Friday, three U.S. citizen children from two families were removed from the United States with their mothers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One of them is a 4-year-old with Stage 4 cancer who was sent without medication or the ability to contact their doctors, a lawyer for the child’s family said. The others are 2 and 7 years old. The children’s situations have intensified concerns that the Trump administration is carrying out deportations in a way that violates the legal rights of both citizens and noncitizens.
Speaking to CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Homan said Sunday that he’s not aware of any specifics in the case of the 4-year-old citizen with cancer, but he dismissed the use of the word “deported” to describe the removal of the American children from the country.
“No U.S. citizen child was deported,” Homan said. “Deported means ordered by an immigration judge.”
Homan insisted that the Trump administration doesn’t “deport U.S. citizen children,” emphasizing instead that the mothers may have wanted to take the children with them when facing deportation. If someone chooses to come to the U.S. without the proper documentation and have a child, Homan said, “that’s on you, that’s not on this administration.” Having a child in the country “is not a get-out-of-jail-free card,” he added.
Charles Kuck, an immigration attorney and law professor at Emory University, said that while Homan might argue that the children weren’t, by legal definition, “deported,” the U.S. government effectively facilitated their removal from the country.
“Who paid for the ticket? It is clear that the U.S. government paid for this ticket – that means these children were deported,” Kuck said. “Whether they had [due] process or not, whether ICE appropriately followed the rules or not, these children were deported. The question you have to ask yourself is: What’s stopping this from happening to me and my kids?”
On Saturday, The Washington Post reported that the lawyers for the two families involved said the children and their mothers were taken into custody while attending routine check-ins last 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 said the families were taken to Alexandria, Louisiana, a three-hour drive from New Orleans, where they were prevented from communicating with other relatives and legal representatives, and were then put on a flight to Honduras.
Details of the case of the 2-year-old child suggest that the girl was not afforded meaningful due process and instead was quickly sent to Honduras, despite her father’s wishes that she remain in the U.S.
Hours after the removal, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee, issued an order expressing his concern that the girl had been sent to Honduras against her father’s wishes while stressing that it is “illegal and unconstitutional” to deport U.S. citizens.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking Sunday to NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” blamed the parents for the fate of the three American children, arguing that it is “up to” the parents whether the kids stay in the country or go, regardless of their citizenship.
“If those children are U.S. citizens, they can come back into the United States if their father or someone here … wants to assume them,” he added.
Immigration lawyers The Post spoke to on Sunday noted that under previous administrations, some American children of deported immigrants have joined their parents in their nations of origin. But by law, those children left the U.S. only after a lengthy process that allowed them to make their own departure preparations.
Bill Hing, founding director of the Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic at the University of San Francisco, said it was concerning that the three American children were removed from the country so quickly. He said he suspected that the children’s mothers faced intense pressure to sign off on their children’s removals.
“In the circumstance that they described – that’s a lot of pressure to make a decision that quick,” Hing said.
John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE director during the Obama administration, said that while “there were times … where we encountered violent criminals who had U.S. citizen children,” the administration then still did everything they could “to give parents the time to decide what to do with their children.”
“This rush to deport people and have them on a plane within hours brings up all sorts of custodial and guardian issues,” he said.
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David Nakamura, Emmanuel Felton and Maegan Vasquez contributed to this report.