Marco Rubio denies Trump is deporting citizen youngsters. They’re deporting moms as an alternative | EUROtoday

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has rejected the notion that the U.S. authorities is deporting its personal residents, at the same time as kids as younger as two years previous have been despatched in a foreign country.

The administration is as an alternative deporting their moms, who select to take their kids with them, Rubio argued Sunday.

Rubio appeared on NBC’s Meet the Pressdefending the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts, which have included the elimination of at the least three U.S. citizen kids, aged two, 4, and 7. They have been despatched in a foreign country with their moms.

“Their mothers, who were illegally in this country, were deported. The children went with their mothers,” Rubio mentioned.

“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. “But, ultimately, who was deported was their mother, their mothers who were here illegally. The children just went with their mothers.”

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The secretary slammed the allegations as “misleading,” arguing that press protection of their removals “sound like ICE agents kicked down the door and grabbed the two-year-old and threw him on an airplane.”

“That’s just not true,” he mentioned.

Deported moms weren’t given the prospect to contact their attorneys throughout their time in custody within the U.S., attorneys mentioned.

While Rubio defended the Trump administration’s efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, he additionally mentioned that each one folks within the U.S., residents and noncitizens alike, are “of course” entitled to due course of.

The two-year-old youngster, recognized in court docket filings as V.M.L., had been detained alongside along with her mom throughout a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement this week. They have been swiftly despatched to Honduras.

The household’s attorneys instructed a decide that the kid’s father has been trying to contact the kid’s mom, however ICE officers blocked him from having a substantive cellphone name.

Trump administration attorneys claimed that the mom wished to convey her youngster along with her.

The decide, nevertheless, mentioned he had wished to confirm that.

“The Government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” Trump-appointed decide Terry Doughty mentioned. “But the Court doesn’t know that.”

Gracie Willis of the National Immigration Project known as ICE’s actions “horrifying and baffling.”

“We should be gravely concerned that ICE has been given tacit approval to both detain and deport U.S. citizen children despite the availability and willingness of U.S.-based caregivers who, only because of ICE’s own actions, cannot find or contact them,” she mentioned in a press release.

Meanwhile, White House border czar Tom Homan instructed Face the Nation on CBS that he’s unaware of final week’s case of a mom who had entered the U.S. illegally and was deported to Honduras alongside along with her four-year-old youngster with stage 4 most cancers.

“Having a U.S. citizen child after you enter this country illegally is not a get out of jail free card,” Homan mentioned Sunday. “It doesn’t make you immune from our laws.”

The secretary and the border czar addressed Sunday information applications amid the Trump administration’s efforts to push the courts to permit fast deportations of immigrants, together with alleged members of the Venezuelan jail gang Tren de Aragua, which Trump labeled “alien enemies” who could be summarily deported below his use of the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to go forward with some deportations below the Alien Enemies Act so long as these being deported “receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal” below the wartime legislation.

They have to be allowed to problem their elimination in courts with the jurisdictions the place they’re imprisoned, the justices mentioned.

During his look on Meet the Press in December because the president-elect, Trump mentioned his mass deportation efforts would doubtless be utilized to households of blended standing, together with households with residents.

“I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back,” Trump mentioned on the time.

Rubio defended the administration’s efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, arguing on Sunday that it was a part of forsaking a long time of coverage that allowed undocumented immigrants to remain within the United States whereas their asylum claims have been processed.

“Once you come into our country illegally, it triggers all kinds of rights that can keep you here indefinitely,” he mentioned. “That’s why we were being flooded at the border, and we’ve ended that.”