The Rule of Law is not Self-Executing: The Illegal Almost-Deportation of Guatemalan Children

On Sunday, August 31, 2025, sometime between 1 and 2 a.m., 76 Guatemalan children—some as young as three—were awakened from their beds in at least four Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters and foster care centers across the country for unaccompanied migrant minors and transported to airports in Texas to be deported. This covert operation bypassed immigration courts and ignored existing legal protections. It was halted only by an emergency judicial intervention, demonstrating that the rule of law is only as enduring as its defenders.

Unaccompanied minors who enter the United States are entitled to special protection under the law. The children in this case were in government custody while awaiting release to sponsors or guardians. Although government lawyers asserted that they were trying to reunite the children with their families, lawyers for the children said that some were fleeing abuse or persecution from criminal gangs in their home country and did not want to return.

In their emergency injunction petitions, attorneys representing the children alleged that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) violated protections unique to unaccompanied minors under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2009, Flores Settlement, and Perez-Funez permanent injunction. They also cited serious due process concerns resulting from DHS’s refusal to adhere to procedural requirements spelled out in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that ensures fairness in removal proceedings for all noncitizens seeking refuge in the United States.

Specifically, attorneys representing the Guatemalan children noted that:

• The decision to halt removal proceedings and summarily deport individuals is
• vested in immigration judges, not in agency personnel;
• Noncitizens ordered removed are entitled to appeal that decision;
• Noncitizens are entitled to seek humanitarian protection via the asylum process;
• The government cannot remove noncitizens to countries where they may face torture.

With no notice, on a holiday weekend, these children were almost stripped of every protection and safeguard built into the U.S. immigration system.

Attorneys for DHS argued that these children were being deported to reunite with their families, as outlined by the Guatemalan government in a proposed repatriation plan. However, advocates for the children said they were representing victims of child abuse, death threats, gang violence, and human trafficking in Guatemala. Even if the Government’s intent to repatriate and reunify was genuine, DHS was still required to prove that intent via the procedural pathways it had flouted.

Federal judges in Washington, D.C., Arizona, and Illinois all issued injunctions blocking these and other deportations. Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan of the U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia, in addressing the emergency filing after being startled awake at 2:30 a.m. that day, wrote, “I have the government attempting to remove unaccompanied minors from the country in the wee hours of the morning on a holiday weekend, which is surprising … Absent action by the courts, all of those children would have been returned to Guatemala, potentially to very dangerous situations.”

U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the same court, in granting an indefinite injunction against these deportations, dismantled the government’s justification, noting that the government’s avowed purpose—reuniting children with their parents—“crumbled like a house of cards about a week later. There is no evidence before the Court that the parents of these children sought their return.

The rule of law requires that executive power be checked by the judiciary. The administration’s attempt to deport these children without due process was not just a policy failure—it was a constitutional crisis narrowly averted by the courts and advocates who acted with the urgency the moment required. The ultimate message of this case is that the government cannot act secretly, ignore judicial oversight, and target the most vulnerable among us without consequence.

But the rule of law is not self-executing. It requires defenders as tenacious and vigilant as those who acted in the middle of the night to defend these children.