In the wee hours of the night, on August 30th, the Trump administration made a monstrous move to take hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children from US shelters and deport them to Guatemala.

The children were taken from their beds, loaded onto buses, and brought to airports in South Texas, where planes waited to transport them out of the country.

Pulling kids from their beds in the middle of the night is deeply concerning behavior, regardless of how the administration tries to justify it. Many of these children have already faced trauma and are especially vulnerable to harm and confusion in such high-pressure situations.

But legal advocates and the media responded quickly, and US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan stepped in with a temporary restraining order to stop the planes from taking off. Even as officials stubbornly continued their deportation plans, the judge held an emergency hearing on Sunday, August 31st, reiterating her order and forcing the administration to back down and return the children to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Laura Nally, Children’s Program Director at Amica Center, said:

“The government is already scrambling to cover its tracks using the same false narratives they’ve been using since January to justify their attacks on immigrant children and the attorneys who represent them. But the truth is that they were hoping that by doing this in the middle of the night over a holiday weekend, there wouldn’t be time to stop it. If it wasn’t for the tireless efforts of advocates across the country, they would have been right. However, it shouldn’t have taken dozens of attorneys working around the clock to restore these children’s basic right to at least tell their stories, to have their cases heard by a judge, rather than being deported out from under the systems already in place to protect them.”

Amica Center and our partners will continue to fight for the rights and safety of immigrant children because everyone has the right to be free, safe, and supported. The government’s actions will continue to be litigated by our dedicated peer groups across the country.