Secretary of State Marco Rubio has pushed back against recent reports suggesting that three young U.S. citizens–children aged two, four, and seven–were deported without proper legal procedures, according to Fox News. Rubio disputed these accounts, stating that the children themselves were not deported. Instead, he explained, their mothers, who were in the country illegally, were subject to deportation and chose to have their children accompany them.
The Washington Post claimed these children, from two different families, were removed from a Louisiana facility alongside their mothers, and that the mother of the four-year-old with cancer was unable to contact their doctors, according to the family’s attorney.
"That’s a misleading headline. Three U.S. citizens, aged 4, 7 and 2 were not deported. Their mothers were legally deported, and the children went with their mothers. They can come back to their father or someone who wants to assume them. Ultimately, it was the mothers who were here illegally. You guys make it sound like ICE kicked down the door and grabbed the child and threw them on an airplane, and it’s misleading and that is not true," Rubio said.
Despite Rubio’s statements, a Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge, Terry A. Doughty, expressed skepticism about the government’s narrative. In response to an emergency order from the father of the two-year-old, Judge Doughty said he had a “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.” The family’s lawyers argued that the toddler was taken to an immigration meeting intended to help her mother remain in the community, but was instead deported to Honduras the next day.
The judge also questioned whether the mother truly wanted her child deported with her, as the government claimed, noting the court had no confirmation of this. According to the family’s attorneys, the girl’s father only managed a brief phone call with the mother before ICE agents ended the conversation, and the child was sent to Honduras soon after.
Rubio maintained that only the mothers were the targets of deportation, and that the children, as U.S. citizens, would be allowed to return if their fathers or other guardians took responsibility for them. He argued that authorities faced a difficult choice: allow the children to leave with their mothers or keep them in the U.S. without their parents, which, he said, would have sparked criticism for “holding hostage” young children while their mothers were deported.