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    What to Know About the 3 U.S. Citizen Children Removed to Honduras

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    Lawyers say the families wanted the children to remain in the United States. The Trump administration says the mothers requested the children’s removal. The dispute has constitutional stakes.The removal of three children with U.S. citizenship with their families to Honduras last week has prompted alarm that President Trump’s strict immigration enforcement may have crossed “illegal and unconstitutional” lines, as a federal judge in one of the cases put it.Lawyers for the two families involved said the mothers were not given an option to leave their children in the United States before they were deported. But Mr. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said the mothers requested the children’s removal.The cases have added to growing concerns that the Trump administration may be violating the Constitution in its increasingly stringent crackdown on immigration, including removing U.S. citizens, a desire that Mr. Trump has expressed in the past but that legal experts say runs against longstanding prohibitions.Here is a look at the cases and what is at stake.What happened?Three children who are U.S. citizens were removed to Honduras last week as part of the deportation of other members of their families.Two of the children, ages 4 and 7, belong to one Honduran family. The mother of those children had an outstanding deportation order and had shown up to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in on Thursday, said Gracie Willis, the raids response coordinator with the National Immigration Project, who is helping the family’s immigration lawyer with the case.The 4-year-old, Ms. Willis said, has cancer. The mother had shown up to the check-in with a lawyer but was quickly thrust into the deportation process. Her lawyer had no meaningful chance to try to stop the deportation in court, Ms. Willis said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Was Deported ‘With No Meaningful Process,’ Judge Suspects

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      A federal judge in Louisiana said the deportation of the child to Honduras with her mother, even though her father had filed an emergency petition, appeared to be “illegal and unconstitutional.”A federal judge in Louisiana expressed concern on Friday that the Trump administration had deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras “with no meaningful process” and against the wishes of her father.In a brief order issued from Federal District Court in the Western District of Louisiana, Judge Terry A. Doughty questioned why the administration had sent the child — known in court papers only as V.M.L. — to Honduras with her mother even though her father had sought in an emergency petition on Thursday to stop the girl from being sent abroad.“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” wrote Judge Doughty, a conservative Trump appointee. “But the court doesn’t know that.”Asserting that “it is illegal and unconstitutional to deport” a U.S. citizen, Judge Doughty set a hearing for May 16 to explore his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”The case of V.M.L., which was reported earlier by Politico, is the latest challenge to the legality of several aspects of President Trump’s aggressive deportation efforts.The administration has already been blocked by six federal judges in courts across the country from removing Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members to El Salvador under a rarely invoked wartime statute. It has also created an uproar by wrongfully deporting a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador and so far refusing to work to bring him back.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Biden Administration’s Contacts With Social Media Companies

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      The case, one of several this term on how the First Amendment applies to technology platforms, was dismissed on the ground that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue.The Supreme Court handed the Biden administration a major practical victory on Wednesday, rejecting a challenge to its contacts with social media platforms to combat what administration officials said was misinformation.The court ruled that the states and users who had challenged the contacts had not suffered the sort of direct injury that gave them standing to sue.The decision, by a 6 to 3 vote, left fundamental legal questions for another day.“The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the yearslong communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different topics,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority. “This court’s standing doctrine prevents us from exercising such general legal oversight of the other branches of government.”Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch, dissented.“For months,” Justice Alito wrote, “high-ranking government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech. Because the court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent.”The case arose from a barrage of communications from administration officials urging platforms to take down posts on topics like the coronavirus vaccine and claims of election fraud. The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, both Republicans, sued, saying that many of those contacts violated the First Amendment.Judge Terry A. Doughty of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Louisiana agreed, saying the lawsuit described what could be “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More