Seventy-six children were taken from federal Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities in the middle of the night on Labor Day weekend and moved to airplanes intended to fly them to Guatemala, the country they had fled from. Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, contacted by attorneys representing the children, ruled that the children had to be taken from the planes and returned to federal custody, with no deportations for 14 days, so that the children’s legal cases could be heard. 

This was an important victory for the National Immigration Law Center. Here is how Kica Matos, president of NILC, described the situation on the PBS NewsHour on September 1: 

“What makes this case stand out in the most egregious ways is that our government in the dead of night ordered the shelters to wake these children up between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning to put them on buses so that they could be transported to Texas, the airport, loaded on planes and deported to Guatemala without making sure that these kids avail themselves of the legal protections and the constitutional rights that they have. 

“Now, understand, none of these kids had received a final deportation order. These are kids whose cases are going through the system. And our government decided that they were going to simply yank away these legal and constitutional protections and send them to Guatemala. 

“The youngest kid that we spoke with is 7 years old. These are all unaccompanied children, who are particularly vulnerable. That is what makes this case so outrageous.” 

The National Immigration Law Center is a member of the Coalition on Human Needs, a source of great pride for us. They are tireless in their dedication to defend the legal rights of migrants. CHN honored NILC for its essential work with our annual Human Needs Hero award back in 2017. This past July, we welcomed Efrén C. Olivares, a NILC attorney based in Texas, who spoke at our 2025 Human Needs Hero event, at which we celebrated the many legal justice champions fighting in court to protect people’s rights. Efrén is one of those champions. During the first Trump term, he fought against the cruel and lawless policy of family separation, in which children, sometimes very young, sometimes with serious health problems, were taken from their parents as they sought asylum here. Now, he is an attorney representing the Guatemalan children taken off the planes.   

The Trump anti-immigrant tactics have shifted since the first term, but its disregard for law and for the needs of children continues. Trump’s enabler Stephen Miller tried to spin this story as their effort to reunite children with their families, but Efrén Olivares, interviewed by The New York Times, responded that at least some of the children “don’t want to return.” Ten of the children, between the ages of 10 and 16, have told judges that they are afraid to return to Guatemala, according to the NILC lawsuit.

Other legal experts have confirmed that the Trump administration actions are “unprecedented.” Michelle Brané, executive director of Together and Free, an advocacy organization that focuses on migrant children and families, noted that the Trafficking Victims Protection Act prohibits expedited removal of unaccompanied children.   

Efrén Olivares’ earlier work showed him the vulnerability of the children wrested from their families, painful experiences he wrote about in his award-winning book My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration From the Front Lines. I’ve read it – you should too. Among the many moving sections of his book is Efrén’s description of listening to an audiotape of imprisoned migrant children crying ceaselessly in devastated fear and loss. Those cries seared and haunted him. Those children, and the ones he is serving now, are fortunate to have an advocate so impelled by the calls of humanity and the requirements of justice.

Efrén’s own story is inspiring – he is an immigrant from Mexico, coming here as an adolescent to join his father, who came to the U.S. to find work. After years here, Efrén got legal status and a green card, and was able to go to college, and eventually law school. That he is using his expertise to defend migrants is a wonderful tribute to his own commitment to justice, and to the best that this country can be. Most of us know this: the U.S. is stronger and more prosperous because of the contributions that immigrants have made. The Trump administration does not want us to remember this; they make gains by defining the people who should be part of our future as the “other.” But many Americans are turning away from Trump’s policies. As they start to see more and more immigrants swept up in raids by masked thugs, they don’t like it. Majorities may support detaining and deporting migrants who have been convicted of crimes, but only 42 or 43 percent supported Trump’s handling of immigrants in July polls. As early as January, just before Trump took office, the Wall St. Journal found that people distinguished between deporting convicted criminals (74 percent favored) and deporting undocumented people with citizen children (38 percent favored) or deporting undocumented people who have lived here for a decade or more, paying taxes, and with no criminal record (only 26 percent supported). If someone polls for attitudes around deporting unaccompanied children who haven’t been seen by a judge, it’s not a wild leap to assume the public will not like it.

In the first Trump term, they separated children from parents in order to deter others from seeking safety from violence in their home countries. Now they are pretending to care about reuniting families, but their goal is the same – demonstrate that people, including children, will be turned back, without regard to the dangers they were fleeing from, and without allowing them the legal protections to which they are entitled. While not a final judicial decision, Judge Sooknanan’s ruling, getting those children off the plane and preserving their opportunity to be heard in court, strikes back against the administration’s lawlessness.