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You won’t believe Trump’s pathetic excuse for targeting immigrant children [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-09-02
President Donald Trump’s approach to deporting immigrant children is becoming more intense, but not without a fight.
Over the weekend, District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to deport more than 600 unaccompanied Guatemalan children to their home country—an effort that the Trump team claimed was to reunite them with their families.
This follows the Guatemalan government’s previous attempt to repatriate hundreds of unaccompanied minors held in foster homes across the United States.
During a news conference Monday, Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo said that their foreign affairs minister was “very concerned” about the conditions of ICE facilities in the United States. He said it was in their best interests to get the children home before they were subjected to abuse.
Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo
ICE facilities have a long history of maltreatment, from pregnant women sleeping on floors and having miscarriages to children puking blood. One investigation even found that immigrants were fired at with rubber bullets after they demanded food and water.
In previous administrations, immigrant children have been allowed to connect with family members in the United States—potentially reprieving them from the abusive system. But Trump’s team is making that process increasingly difficult.
ICE is now conducting interviews with the family members of immigrant children, potentially preventing them from reuniting out of fear that they, too, will be deported. ICE officials have also started interviewing the children and, in some cases, asking them if they want to self deport.
RAICES, a nonprofit refugee and immigrant center that helps with legal services and other needs, told Daily Kos that Trump's coordinated attacks are all part of the administration's plan to "destroy confidence in the integrity of long-held, lawful pathways to immigration relief" for people of all ages.
"Under the guise of law and order, the administration has criminalized everyone from families attending their scheduled asylum hearings in immigration courts nationwide, only to be arrested and detained through the collusion of the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security—to kids fleeing persecution, only to be shackled on this weekend’s attempted deportation flights," Faisal Al-Juburi, RAICES chief external affairs officer, said.
While the Trump administration has argued that its purpose is to “reunify” children with their families, advocates argue that deporting these children just puts them in danger.
"In the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala," Efrén C Olivares of the National Immigration Law Center, which filed the suit to block the deportation, said in a statement obtained by the BBC.
And while some parents of the deported children awaited their arrival in Guatemala, others made it clear that they wanted their children to remain in the United States.
But as the Trump administration continues to prove, it couldn’t care less about reuniting children with their families; it just wants to get immigrants, regardless of their age, out of the country—and at any cost.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/2/2341496/-You-won-t-believe-Trump-s-pathetic-excuse-for-targeting-immigrant-children?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_10&pm_medium=web
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