The Trump administration has deported three U.S. citizen children to Honduras: a 4-year-old who was actively receiving treatment for a rare form of stage 4 cancer, his 7-year-old sister, and a 2-year-old girl who was separated from her father and expelled with her undocumented pregnant mother. The mothers were coerced into taking their U.S. citizen children and prohibited from communicating with other family members or their lawyers until they arrived in Honduras. Attorney Gracie Willis, who is representing the 2-year-old girl, says the deportation of a U.S. citizen not given “any way to contest that or express the option to stay in the United States” is unprecedented.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: As President Trump marks 100 days since returning to office this week, protests have continued nationwide against his mass deportations and rising concerns of due process violations. On Friday, the Trump administration deported three U.S.-citizen children to Honduras, including a 4-year-old boy who was actively receiving treatment for a rare form of stage 4 cancer. The boy and his 7-year-old sister, who’s also a U.S. citizen, were deported along with their undocumented mother. That same day, another child with U.S. citizenship, a 2-year-old girl, was also sent to Honduras with her mother, who’s pregnant, and her undocumented 11-year-old sibling. In that case, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, who’s a Trump appointee, said the girl was deported, quote, “with no meaningful process,” unquote. The judge added, quote, “I’ve never seen anything like it. There is just no good-faith interpretation for what happened to these children,” the Trump-appointed judge said.

The two mothers and their children were detained last week after attending routine check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana. Lawyers for both families say the mothers were coerced into taking their U.S. citizen children with them when they were deported. In the case of the 2-year-old girl, her father is still in the United States. A federal judge in Louisiana raised concerns about Trump officials removing her from the country against the wishes of her father. The mothers were reportedly prohibited from communicating with other family members or their lawyers after they were detained, and their relatives did not know of their whereabouts until the mothers arrived in Honduras.

The cases have further raised questions of the harmful impacts of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies will have on mixed-status families in the U.S. The Brookings Institution’s Center for Migration Studies estimates nearly 5 million U.S. citizen children have at least one undocumented parent.

For more, we go to Gracie Willis, an attorney with the National Immigration Project representing the 2-year-old U.S. citizen girl who was deported from Louisiana early Friday morning.

Gracie Willis, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you first describe what happened to your client? And then we’ll go on to the 4-year-old boy suffering 4th stage cancer.

GRACIE WILLIS: Yes. Good morning, Amy. Thank you so much for having me.

What happened is that in the early-morning hours on Friday, the United States government, after having detained U.S. citizen children, flew them out of the country with no eyes on these........

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