AUSTIN — Two U.S. citizen children were deported Wednesday morning to Mexico along with their mother, according to an attorney who has consulted with the family.
Cori Hash, a senior staff attorney with Immigrant Legal Resource Center, told The Dallas Morning News on Wednesday that the family was detained last week near the campus of Dobie Middle School in North Austin.
Texas Department of Public Safety Troopers stopped the family on the morning of Wednesday, April 30, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained the man. The woman was not detained but was informed to go to an ICE facility in San Antonio the next day. It’s not clear how many of their children were in the car, Hash said.
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The man and woman are not married, Hash said, but have been together several years and have three children together. The children are 8, 5 and 4 years old and the two youngest are U.S. citizens, Hash said. The man was deported on Tuesday. The woman and her three children were deported Wednesday morning, Hash said.
Hash asked that the man and woman not be identified to avoid putting them at risk.
“They had no due process whatsoever,” Hash said. “It just goes to show that this administration feels that it can deport U.S. citizens whenever it wishes and however it wishes.”
The News could not immediately confirm if the two children were U.S. citizens. Officials with the Mexican Consulate in Austin interviewed the man while he was detained at the J.J. Pickle federal building downtown on April 30, said Carlos Enrique Gonzalez Echevarria, the director of the Department of Protection at the Consulate. The man told the officials his two youngest children were born in the United States.
Spokespeople with the Department of Homeland Security, the ICE field office in San Antonio and DPS did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment on Wednesday afternoon.
This is not the first time attorneys have accused President Donald Trump‘s administration of deporting U.S. citizens as it attempts to launch the largest deportation operation in the country’s history.
Last month, attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union said three U.S. citizen children were deported to Honduras. One of the U.S. citizen children who was deported was a 4-year-old with cancer.
After attorneys with the ACLU accused the administration of removing U.S. citizens, DHS published a news release April 29 saying the mothers chose to be deported with their children.
Hash said the pair deported Wednesday had family members in the country who could take care of their children, but the family members were not allowed to communicate with the man and woman once they were detained.
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Michelle Lapointe, legal director for the American Immigration Council, said she has noticed a pattern where ICE does not give parents the opportunity to make the best decision for their children.
“The result is that you’re essentially exiling a U.S. citizen to a country that they don’t necessarily know or have any connection to when you’re not allowing parents to make arrangements for their children to remain,” she said in a phone interview.
After the man was detained, the woman drove down to San Antonio on Friday, May 2, and was given an ankle monitor, Hash said. She was then told to go on Tuesday morning to an ICE facility in Pflugerville – a city about 20 miles north of Austin. She went with her three children, and all were detained.
“I was actually on the phone with her at the time when the ICE agents instructed her to come inside, and her three children were detained at that point,” Hash said.
The man was deported on Tuesday, and the woman and her three children were deported Wednesday morning, Hash said, to Reynosa, the border city across from McAllen, Texas.
