


A D.C. District Court judge issued a minute order today declaring that hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan minors should remain in the United States, thwarting a Trump administration effort to deport them back to their native country.
The ruling follows reports on Friday that Trump administration officials were planning to remove over 600 Guatemalan unaccompanied minors from the Office of Refugee Resettlement and send them to Guatemala. In the early hours of Sunday morning, the attorney for 10 of these minors, Hilda Bonilla, filed an emergency complaint, warning the judge that the deportation was imminent.
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“Defendants are imminently planning to illegally transfer Plaintiffs to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (‘ICE’) custody to put them on flights to Guatemala, where they may face abuse, neglect, persecution, or even torture, against their best interests,” Bonilla wrote in the complaint.
Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, appointed by former President Joe Biden, originally ordered that the Trump administration officials could not remove any of the plaintiffs from the country for 14 days and scheduled the Zoom court hearing for 3 p.m. Sunday.
Sooknanan subsequently moved the hearing up to 12:30 p.m. after she received notification that several minors were “in the process of being removed from the United States.” After the hearing, Sooknanan issued a minute order that officials cannot “transfer, repatriate, remove, or otherwise facilitate the transport of” the unaccompanied minors or make any effort to do so. She also ordered the officials to file a status report of the efforts to deplane the minors.
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Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are several of the Trump Administration officials listed as defendants in the class-action suit.
The Guatemalan minors, who all arrived in the U.S. alone, will remain in the U.S. as the lawsuit plays out in court, according to the Associated Press. For now, they will remain in custody with the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is an office under the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees the care of unaccompanied minors without legal status.