https://www.politico.com/news/
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U.S. District Judge Tim Kelly, a Trump appointee, took the administration to task as he blocked the deportation of hundreds of children.
People board a plane in Harlingen, Texas, Aug. 31, 2025, as four charter buses are pulled into the side of the airport to unload dozens of passengers. | Valerie Gonzalez/AP
A federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump has blocked the administration’s bid to deport hundreds of Guatemalan children to their home country, concluding that U.S. officials’ claims about the operation had “crumbled like a house of cards.”
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly issued a preliminary injunction Thursday, extending a block on the deportations first issued by Biden-appointed Judge Sparkle Sooknanan last month. Sooknanan, who was the emergency judge on call over Labor Day weekend, raced to block the operation after immigrant rights’ lawyers sued in the middle of the night as the children were being picked up from startled caregivers and loaded onto planes.
A Justice Department attorney told Sooknanan at the time that the lawsuit to block the deportations was “outrageous” because parents of the children had requested their return and some were waiting at an airport in Guatemala for them.
After Sooknanan’s ruling, Trump allies — including some in the White House — attacked the judge, contending she was blocking Guatemalan kids from reuniting with their parents.
“The Biden judge is effectively kidnapping these migrant children and refusing to let them return home to their parents in their home country,” Trump aide Stephen Miller wrote on X that day.
But Kelly, in his ruling Thursday, said that allegation was simply not true. Many of the administration’s claims, he noted, fell apart quickly when the Guatemalan government reported that it was unable to locate most of the children’s parents, and those it could find said they had not sought their children’s return and preferred for them to seek economic opportunity in the United States.
Kelly repeatedly chided the administration for making the baseless claim.
“While Defendants plunged ahead in the middle of the night with their ‘reunification’ plan and then represented to a judge that a parent or guardian had requested each child’s return, that turned out not to be true,” he wrote. “On this record, it appears that Defendants intend to send back to Guatemala many unaccompanied children without an identified parent or legal guardian there.”
Advocates for the Guatemalan children targeted for deportation described intense fear and anguish about the operation, saying their clients were roused in the middle of the night, some pulled from foster homes over their protests and bused to the airport.
“Today’s court decision is a significant victory for the hundreds of children who are now safe from the Trump administration’s unlawful attempt to expel them from the United States,” said Efrén Olivares, vice president of litigation and legal strategy at the National Immigration Law Center.
The Justice Department has provided little explanation for the apparent misstatements to the court. The senior DOJ attorney who made the claims at the Aug. 31 Zoom hearing, Drew Ensign, did not attend the court session last week where Kelly heard arguments on the requested injunction.
At that session, another DOJ lawyer, Sarah Welch, said Ensign’s earlier assertion was “withdrawn.” She also expressed some regret about the way the operation was handled. “It was unfortunate that the children were frightened and pulled out in the middle of the night,” Welch said.
Spokespeople for the White House, the Justice Department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for housing unaccompanied immigrant minors, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling.
Ensign has faced scrutiny from other judges over his representations in similarly fraught immigration cases, including an emergency lawsuit over the president’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act — similarly involving rushed deportations over a weekend in March — and the case of illegally deported Salvadoran man Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
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