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Immigration officers abducted a mother and her two children, detained them in a hotel room, and then illegally deported them to Honduras — all within the span of less than 24 hours, a new lawsuit says. The children, a 7-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy, are both U.S. citizens. The boy has stage four kidney cancer.
On July 31, the National Immigration Project and others filed suit on behalf of two families who they say were illegally deported to Honduras. When news of their deportations broke in April, the government’s actions were widely condemned. In both cases, the victims believed they were going to routine immigration check-ins. The plaintiffs are identified only by their first names in the complaint. At the time of the abductions, they were residents of Louisiana.
The suit says that on April 22, Julia went to an immigration check-in when she and her two daughters, ages 2 and 11, were arrested and held at an undisclosed location for days.
Julia then learned for the first time that the U.S. government had issued a removal order for her and her 11-year-old daughter, Janelle, in 2020, although she had reported to ICE for years, according to the complaint. In 2019, they had come to the United States seeking asylum after Janelle was the victim of an attempted kidnapping.
The suit alleges that ICE officers refused to let Julia speak with her attorney or have any meaningful contact with her family. On April 25, she and her daughters, one of whom is a U.S. citizen, were deported to Honduras. At the time Julia was about six weeks pregnant.
On the same day, ICE deported Rosario and her two children, both of whom are U.S. citizens. Her 4-year-old son, Romeo, had been undergoing treatment for kidney cancer at Manning Family Children’s Hospital in New Orleans. Like Julia, Rosario learned that the U.S. government had issued a removal order for her when she was 15, according to the suit. Rosario came to the United States as an unaccompanied minor when she was 12 years old, turned herself into ICE authorities, and was then released to her mother, who was living in Louisiana.
“To Rosario’s knowledge, she did not receive any notice to appear in immigration court after she was released to her mother’s custody,” the suit says. “Rosario lived, went to school, and worked in Louisiana for more than ten years without a single incident and without awareness that there was any immigration proceeding or order against her.”
She gave birth to two children, who are both U.S. citizens. At two years old, her son was diagnosed with cancer.
On February 6, 2025, she was taken into ICE custody after a traffic stop and released. She was assigned to participate in a non-detention supervision program called ISAP, and told to report to the ISAP office with her two children and their passports. When she arrived for her appointment on April 24, she was asked to hand over her children’s passports, which she did, and she and her children were then directed to wait in a room. The officers would not let her attorney accompany them. Inside the room, ICE officers ordered her to sign a document, confiscated her phone and wallet, and told her that she and her children were going to be deported to Honduras.
“She explained that her U.S. citizen son, Romeo, needed to stay in the United States to receive critical, life-saving medical care,” the suit says. “But her repeated requests to speak with her attorney were ignored and dismissed by the officers. Instead, the ICE officers kept Rosario and her young children in the room and berated them.”
The officers refused to let Rosario speak with her attorney and only let her use an ICE officer’s phone to briefly call her father. The officers forced Rosario and her children “to exit through the back door of the office, thereby evading their legal counsel and preventing any potential advocates from intervening on the family’s behalf,” the suit says.
They were then placed in a vehicle and driven for about three hours, eventually arriving at a hotel in Alexandria, Louisiana.
“For the duration of the trip, the [officers] rejected Rosario’s pleas for information and refused to tell Rosario or her children where they were being taken or for how long they would be held there,” the suit says.
Rosario’s attorney filed an application for a stay of removal as she tried to find out where her client had been taken.
“Finally, after many hours of pleading, one of the officers allowed Rosario to make a phone call. Rosario called the only phone number she had memorized: her father’s,” the suit says. “When her father answered the phone, she quickly told him that she and her children were in Alexandria and that they were being deported the next day. She asked her father to call the family’s attorney. A few seconds into the call, the officer abruptly took the phone away.”
The suit alleges that in the early morning hours of April 25, 2025, the officers took Rosario and her children to an airport near Alexandria. About four hours later, they were forced to board a plane and flown to Honduras. Around this time, Rosario’s attorney received an email from the director of the New Orleans ICE field office that the stay of removal application had been denied.
After they arrived in Honduras, Rosario’s son’s health deteriorated. Unable to find specialists equipped to treat her son, she had to send him back to the United States to receive treatment.
“After so many years in the United States, it has been devastating to be sent to Honduras,” Rosario said in a statement. “Since returning, my daughter has gotten sick and struggled with anxiety, and I’ve been struggling with my own health issues too. I was diagnosed with high anxiety and prescribed medication for stress. It’s not the same as living in your own country. It’s been painful every step of the way.”
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