They endured child separation and received legal status. Now ICE is trying to deport them.
The 23-year-old Honduran man was legally living and working in the U.S. and had the documents to prove it. The U.S. government had allowed him to enter the country as part of a legal settlement for families that suffered under the first Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that separated children from their parents at the border. Yet he’s spent the past five months locked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana, facing deportation.
As this article from The Marshall Project examines, he’s one of at least 25 people ICE has detained or deported in recent months, despite their having legal status and protections granted by the child separation settlement, court records show.
Beginning in 2017, thousands of immigrant children were traumatically separated from their parents at the border without cause. It was one of the first Trump administration’s most controversial actions, a policy that a federal judge later said caused “lasting, excruciating harm.” The American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of the families, which the government settled in 2023, offering them legal status in the U.S., with pathways for residency, asylum and authorization to work.
Now, in President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. government has betrayed key terms of the deal. People who were supposed to be protected by the federal court settlement have been detained and deported, records show. The Department of Homeland Security informed families they suddenly had to pay a $1,000 fee per person to enter or to remain in the country. And the government stopped paying contractors it had hired to reunite families, and assist with job placement and legal paperwork.
“Perhaps naively, we had hoped the Trump administration would finally acknowledge the harm it did during its first term, but instead it has repeatedly violated the settlement and subjected already-traumatized families to even more harm,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project, told The Marshall Project.
Homeland Security officials didn’t respond to requests for comment. In their court filings, lawyers for the government have argued that the settlement agreement “does not restrict the government’s statutory authority to execute orders of removal.” They have also contended that courts lack the authority to order the government to return at taxpayer expense the people whom it wrongfully deported.
A federal judge in California rebuked the U.S. government in February, ordering it to return several families it had deported in violation of the settlement in the lawsuit known as Ms. L v. ICE. The judge said the government’s actions “rendered the benefits of the Settlement Agreement illusory for these families, and the manner in which each of these removals was affected, in addition to being unlawful, involved lies, deception, and coercion.”
Now families that the government promised not to separate are once again figuring out how to get their loved ones home.
It was Y.M.M.’s 23rd birthday last October, and like many young men in Louisiana, he wanted to go fishing and shooting with his buddies. (The Marshall Project is identifying him by his initials because of his family’s concerns that using his full name would lead to retribution or threaten his safety.) He and two friends went to the Maurepas Swamp Wildlife Management Area, about 30 minutes northwest of New Orleans.
Target shooting there is common, but prohibited. Unfortunately for these friends, a pair of Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries officers heard the gunshots. The officers found three young adult men who spoke “a little English,” and showed various forms of state and international ID along with their guns, which the officers later verified were legally obtained, according to the incident report.
Shooting targets in a protected wildlife area is an offense for which a person typically receives a ticket. But the agency that supervises hunting and fishing rules in Louisiana is one of more than 1,400 local law enforcement entities in the U.S. that have an immigration enforcement agreement with ICE. So “due to the unknown immigration status and them possessing firearms,” the Wildlife and Fisheries officers immediately contacted Homeland Security and ICE, according to the incident report.
Federal agents arrested the three men, including Y.M.M. Despite his valid immigration documents, he has remained in a detention facility in Louisiana for more than five months.
Y.M.M. came to the U.S. as a qualified family member of one of the lawsuit plaintiffs. In 2018, his 7-year-old brother had traveled from Honduras with his father, who was searching for work to support his family, including his wife, Idalia, his daughter and Y.M.M.
Idalia remembers her youngest son’s face as she sent him off to the U.S., full cheeks and a mop of blonde curls. Her husband was immediately taken into custody when he crossed the border into New Mexico in 2018, and couldn’t call her for nearly two weeks, she said in Spanish in an interview with The Marshall Project. She remembers the dread of her husband calling and saying, “My love, they took our child.”
“My love, how do you not know where our child is?” Idalia recalled saying.
Immigration officers had immediately seized their son and sent him to New York, though it took the family months to figure out where the government had taken him. He remained in a group home in Brooklyn for several months, and at one point was nearly offered for adoption, according to his mother.
As soon as they located their youngest, she said, the family did everything they could to get him home to Honduras. A cousin who lived in Florida went to pick the boy up in New York and kept him until they could arrange to get him home safely. Idalia and her family lost nearly a year with their youngest son.
“Physically, he was well,” she said. “Psychologically, it damaged him.”
The first Trump administration enacted the zero tolerance policy without a plan for how to reunite the separated children with their families. They also lacked legal basis for taking children in the first place, according to attorneys and advocates, which became the basis for the Ms. L v. ICE lawsuit.
Though the parents were arrested by Homeland Security, the children were immediately handed over to a different agency — the Office of Refugee Resettlement. In all, the U.S. government separated about 5,000 children from their parents, according to the ACLU.
Stories of what was happening to the families began to flood the media in 2018, and outrage grew. Even one of Trump’s most ardent supporters, the Rev. Franklin Graham, called the child separation policy “disgraceful.” The ACLU’s class action lawsuit in 2018 sought to stop the practice and to hold the government accountable.
Bowing to public pressure and court orders, Trump issued an executive order rescinding the policy in June 2018. But immigration advocates insisted the practice continued in various formats for several years.
The settlement of the lawsuit was announced years later under President Joe Biden and approved by a federal judge: It promised eligible families special asylum consideration, legal presence (known as parole in the immigration system) in the U.S. while the asylum claims were considered, work authorization, psychological counseling and legal services to aid with immigration.
In 2022, a contractor hired to locate the families eligible as part of the then-ongoing class action lawsuit contacted Idalia and her family in Honduras. By then, Y.M.M., their eldest child, was 19. In the years since the family reunited, their home country had been infiltrated by MS-13 gang members and plagued with violence. Soon, he faced a choice many young Honduran men must confront: Join or die.
The U.S. Department of State’s website currently advises against travel to Honduras, warning that violent crime — including homicide, kidnapping, rape and human trafficking — remains common, and “violent gang activity is widespread.”
Coming to the U.S. with permission from the government, financial assistance and valid documents under the settlement agreement seemed like the family’s best option to save their eldest son from being forced into a life of violence.
“God is giving us this chance, we need to go,” Idalia told her family.
In summer 2022, the family traveled to the U.S. and ended up together in Florida. Idalia still has their plane ticket stubs among the immigration documents she keeps in a folder for the family. Her eldest son’s Honduran passport shows a stamp on June 2 of that year, when he landed at the Atlanta airport and went through customs. The family eventually moved to central Louisiana, and her eldest son worked for months as a welder, ironworker and electrician.
After ICE arrested Y.M.M., the family didn’t think it would be hard to get him released, his mother said. They had the proper paperwork, including his parole documents and employment authorization card. When he’d been locked up for several weeks, the family paid $6,500 to a local immigration law firm for help. But despite the firm’s filings in Louisiana’s immigration court, a deportation order was issued on Jan. 6 for Y.M.M. — even though he had not committed a criminal offense (shooting guns in the wildlife area was a civil citation).
The removal order is under appeal in immigration court, records show. Lawyers for the ACLU maintain that his arrest and detention are clear violations of the settlement agreement and filed a motion on April 1 for the release of Y.M.M. and several other members of the settlement class.
Y.M.M. calls his family only twice a week from the detention facility, because the calls are so expensive, his mother said. The family sends him money so he can buy packets of ramen and cans of sardines, to supplement the bread, beans and hot dogs fed to people locked up there.
The presents his family bought for his 23rd birthday are still waiting for him at home.
Court records show that ICE deported at least six people, all subject to the settlement protections, before the ACLU could file petitions on their behalf. Several were instructed to self-deport and told by immigration officers their legal status under the settlement didn’t matter, according to court records.
A 20-year-old from Guatemala, who was granted legal status in 2022 through the settlement, was arrested by ICE agents at a gas station in December. He spent at least a week in the Florida lockup known as “Alligator Alcatraz” before he was transferred to detention in Louisiana and deported. On Dec. 18, court records show, lawyers for the ACLU emailed officials at the Department of Justice about another detained man from Guatemala who, due to an existing court order, they contended should not be deported. Court records show that on the same day, Homeland Security put him on a flight to Guatemala.
One of the other deported plaintiffs is a single mother of three who was returned to Honduras with her children in July. She has since received death threats from local men seeking to extort money, according to court records. Lawyers for the ACLU said the government has not notified them that any of the deported class members have been returned to the U.S.
Meanwhile, dozens of families that are part of the settlement had their paroles denied because they could not pay a $1,000-per-person fee that the government increased and started trying to collect last year. The federal judge overseeing the settlement said the fee increase violated the original agreement terms.
The Department of Justice last year abruptly notified the firm hired to provide legal services for the eligible families that its contract was being canceled, at the behest of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The judge overseeing the settlement ordered the government to resume providing legal services, because this was a mess of its own making when it enacted the zero tolerance policy that “gratuitously tore the sacred bond that existed between these parents and their children.”
Meanwhile, the ICE detentions and deportations, even if they’re eventually overturned, have had another effect. Very few families have had the chance to apply for asylum, a key feature of the settlement, because the legal firms assisting them have been busy renewing other documents and fighting to ensure that their clients aren’t detained or deported.
The deadline to apply is December.
Additional reporting contributed by Manuel Torres
This story was produced by The Marshall Project and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
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