Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Denisse Parra Vargas’ three children — two of them American citizens and one born in Mexico — in Texas last week and, because authorities deported their mother, sent them out of the United States too.
The administration has responded to blowback from the children’s expulsions and those of other U.S. citizen minors, including a child with cancer and one recovering from a rare brain tumor, by saying the mothers were in the U.S. illegally and chose to take their children with them. The families and their attorneys vehemently disagree that the mothers had a choice.
Secret of State Marco Rubio suggested in an interview April 27 on “Meet the Press” that the children’s situations are easily fixed.
“If those children are U.S. citizens,” he said, “they can come back into the United States if there’s their father or someone here who wants to assume them.”
While attorneys, advocates and researchers agree that U.S. citizens generally have the right to return, they said suggestions that the children can just easily come back to the U.S. gloss over the barriers and difficulties of what that would entail.
There are many hurdles that families would need to overcome for their U.S. citizen children to be able to return, according to Mich P. González, co-founder of Sanctu of the South, an immigration and LGBTQ civil rights cooperative. His group and its member organizations has been assisting two families whose mothers were deported from Florida and their children, including three U.S. citizens, who were sent with them.
González said ICE often confiscates identification documents when deporting people. For example, the 2-year-old U.S. citizen daughter of the Honduran mother González represents had her passport taken away before she left, he said. That means the family would have to get the necess paperwork from the U.S. to prove the child was born there.
In many cases, U.S. citizen children don’t have passports in the first place, which are required when returning to the U.S. from a foreign country by air. Children younger than 16 arriving from Canada or Mexico, if they don’t have passports, must have original birth certificates or other specific documents to return to the U.S.
“They don’t have passports, the two children only have their birth certificates,” said Naiara Leite Da Silva, the attorney representing Parra Vargas. “Not sure if mom has the original or a copy, but she only has the birth certificates, so it would entail a long and convoluted process before they could potentially come back.”
Finding an authorized guardian who is a U.S. citizen and can travel with the child can also be difficult, González said. Families would have to come up with the money to cover the costs of flying their children back to the U.S. or covering the cost of a guardian at a time when they may be financially strained, attorneys said.
One of the biggest complications right now, according to González, is any potential risk for the U.S.-based guardian to travel outside the country to go get the child. The administration has ratcheted up the power of border authorities to determine who should be admitted back into the country, even those with legal immigration status.
“You can risk being stranded outside the United States,” González said.
Activists and attorneys said that the nation’s focus should be on whether the children should have been expelled in the first place.
They argue that the parents may have had options for remaining in the U.S. had they been given a chance to consult with an attorney. In some of the recent cases, attorneys have pointed out that parents could have at least settled the question on whether their children should remain in the U.S. and with whom, before their deportation.
Leite Da Silva said the Parra Vargas’ family “strongly opposes the government narrative that it was the family’s choice to keep the children with them … they never had the choice of leaving their children in the United States.” Because of that, she refers to the children as “forced expatriates.”
She said Parra Vargas was “entrapped” because the family alleges they were told to come in for an asylum interview where they would get work authorization papers, and they were told to bring the children with them. According to the attorney, once they were at the appointment and were told they were to be deported, they weren’t allowed to communicate with family members who were in the Pflugerville processing center parking lot and who were legal residents and could have kept the children.
In response to questions from NBC News, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secret Tricia McLaughlin stated via email that if an immigrant in the country illegally is subject to detention, they “will almost assuredly be detained.” DHS had previously stated that Parra Vargas had a deportation order after she failed to appear at a 2019 immigration hearing.
McLaughlin repeated DHS’ previous statements that parents illegally in the country can “take control of their departure” and leave using an app created by the administration and that the administration is offering those who leave $1,000 and a free flight.
ICE adopted procedures during the Obama administration — Trump border czar Tom Homan was acting ICE director at the time — to give families time to decide what to do about their citizen children, said Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project. She added that one of the mothers deported from Florida had said she didn’t want her U.S. citizen children to have to leave the country.
The parents’ decision to keep their child with them or send them back to the U.S. is not so easily reached.
Parents have to consider whether leaving them behind, sending their child back to the U.S. or even the act of traveling without their parent could further traumatize their child, González said.
One of the children sent out of the country when her mother was deported to Mexico is 11 and is recovering from a brain tumor.
