Judge halts US effort to deport Guatemalan children as planes sit on tarmac

A U.S. Air Force plane that was used to deport migrants in Guatemala City, Guatemala on Jan. 30, 2025. A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting Guatemalan children back to their home country, and scheduled an emergency hearing on Sunday to determine whether the deportations were legal. (Daniele Volpe/The New York Times)

By MIRIAM JORDAN and AISHVARYA KAVI

With children already loaded onto planes, a federal judge Sunday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting dozens of Guatemalan minors and demanded assurances that they would remain in shelters until a more permanent ruling.

The order brought to a close, for now, another last-minute flurry of court action in the administration’s mass deportation drive. Lawyers for the children said that they would face peril if they were sent to Guatemala and that doing so would deny them due process. They also argued that the government had ignored special protections for minors who cross the border alone.

In the early hours Sunday, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a temporary restraining order forbidding the administration from deporting the children after the National Immigration Law Center filed an emergency request.

Sooknanan’s order was intended to be in place until an emergency hearing could be held in the afternoon. But there was initial confusion among lawyers whether the order applied to a limited number of children.

Dozens of children were then removed by immigration authorities from shelters overnight and boarded onto chartered planes. After lawyers for the children notified the judge, the emergency hearing was moved up to midday, and with planes awaiting takeoff in Texas, the judge clarified her order to apply to all Guatemalan children in the custody of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement for the next 14 days while the case is pending. She directed the government to take the children off the planes, and in a court document on Sunday evening, the government confirmed that was done.

About 2,000 children, a majority of them from Guatemala, are currently being held in dozens of shelters.

“I don’t want there to be any ambiguity about what I am ordering,” said the judge. “You cannot remove any children” while the case proceeds.

In the hearing, the judge expressed frustration with the government and her inability to reach its representatives in the early hours of Sunday, before issuing her initial order.

“I have the government attempting to remove minor children from the country in the wee hours of the morning on a holiday weekend, which is surprising,” she said.

The government’s lawyer, Drew Ensign, said that the repatriations had been requested by the Guatemalan government and that the children were to be reunited with parents and guardians in their home country.

“The United States government is trying to facilitate the return of these children to their parents or guardians, from whom they have been separated,” Ensign said.

But Efrén Olivares, the lawyer representing the children, disputed that argument. At least some of the children “have not requested to return,” he said. “They don’t want to return.”

He added that the law prevents children from being removed expeditiously from the United States until a judge has assessed the safety of their return. Many of the children have cases that are still pending, he said.

Carlos Ramíro Martínez, Guatemala’s minister of foreign affairs, said Friday that his country had been coordinating with the United States and expected to receive more than 600 minors. In an interview Friday, he told The New York Times that he hoped that the repatriations would happen in a gradual, organized manner. He added that the initiative began when Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, visited Guatemala in July.

Sooknanan’s order at least temporarily hamstrings the federal government’s attempts to return to Guatemala hundreds of unaccompanied minors who have been in U.S. custody after crossing the southern border.

The judge, who was nominated to the bench by President Joe Biden, granted a request by the government lawyer to file a response opposing the order Friday.

On the social platform X, Stephen Miller, a White House official and architect of Trump’s immigration crackdown, blamed the Biden administration for children being in the United States without their parents, saying they were “orphaned in America” by that administration. He added that “a Democrat judge is refusing to let them reunify with their parents.”

Though the judge’s order is temporary, it is the second recent setback for President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. On Friday, another judge blocked the administration from carrying out rapid deportations far from the border, a cornerstone of the White House’s immigration policy.

The lawsuit over the Guatemalan children was filed in the early hours of Sunday after staff members at shelters that were holding the children were notified by email Saturday that they should prepare some of them to be sent back to Guatemala. Lawyers representing some of the children received a similar email.

In its lawsuit, the National Immigration Law Center said that the children’s repatriation would violate federal law and the Constitution. It called the government’s actions “unlawful and reckless.”

Ten children, between the ages of 10 and 16, are identified by their initials in the lawsuit. They have told judges that they are afraid to return to Guatemala, the lawsuit says.

The number of unaccompanied minors entering the United States has plummeted since Trump began his second term.

Migrant children have posed a particular challenge to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda because they are entitled to special protections.

Hundreds of thousands of children, mainly from Central America, have crossed the southern border into the United States in the past decade, often seeking to join friends or relatives. Many of the minors have won the right to remain in the United States permanently by proving that they were abandoned or persecuted in their home countries.

When unaccompanied children entering the United States are taken into custody, they typically remain in shelters until they are released to sponsors or guardians who have been vetted. The children the Trump administration was seeking to deport have been awaiting release from the shelters.

“We are very concerned that our clients could be returned to unsafe situations,” said Alexa Sendukas, a managing attorney with the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project.