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 families. We have two families here, as you mentioned, and there are really striking similarities between these families in what they went through. In both, there were sort of two stories unfolding simultaneously. There was the outside and the inside. Outside, there were lawyers, loved ones, family members who were persistently trying to find these families and get contact with them. The asks were really simple: Where are they? And can we speak with them? Inside, both of the mothers had the same request. Both of the mothers were trying to get in touch with anyone — a lawyer, family members — who could help them either figure out their immigration cases or help take care of their children.

In both cases, ICE was speaking to both parties, telling the same lies that prevented communication between the mothers and the people who were trying to assist them outside. And this was to achieve ICE’s ultimate aim, which was to send these parents and their children out of the country on a flight out of a rural airport under the cover early-morning hours without any access.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go to CBS’s Face the Nation, where Trump’s so-called border czar Tom Homan claimed there were no due process violations when your client, a 2-year-old U.S. citizen, was deported to Honduras with her mom.

TOM HOMAN: I’m not aware of the specific case, but no U.S. citizen child was deported. “Deported” means you’ve got to be ordered deported by an immigration judge. We don’t deport U.S. citizens. These children were — 

MARGARET BRENNAN:: The mother was deported along with the children.

TOM HOMAN: The children aren’t deported. The mother chose to take the children with her. When you enter the country illegally, and you know you’re here illegally, and you choose to have a U.S. citizen child, that’s on you. That’s not on this administration. If you choose to put your family in that position, that’s on them. But having a U.S. citizen child after you enter this country illegally is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It doesn’t make you immune from our laws.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is the Secretary of State Marco Rubio being questioned on NBC’s Meet the Press, defending the Trump administration’s decision to [deport] U.S. citizen children.

SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: If someone’s in his country unlawfully, illegally, that person gets deported. If that person is with a 2-year-old child or has a 2-year-old child and says, “I want to take my child with you — with me,” well, then what — you have two choices. You can say, yes, of course, you can take your child, whether they’re a citizen or not, because it’s your child, or you can say, yes, you can go, but your child must stay behind. And then your headlines would read, “U.S. holding hostage 2-year-old, 4-year-old, 7-year-old, while mother deported.” So, the mother, the parents make that choice. I imagine those three U.S. citizen children have fathers here in the United States. They can stay with their father. That’s up to their family to decide where the children go. Children go with their parents. Parents decide where their children go. The U.S. deported their mothers, who were illegally in America.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the U.S. secretary of state, Gracie Willis. The parents get to decide, he said. Can you respond to both him and Tom Homan?

GRACIE WILLIS: Absolutely. First of all, whether or not these were technically deportations is beside the point. The point is that these children were taken without any choice, by their caregivers or them, out of the country by ICE, which is an immigration agency.

In terms of the parents’ choice, Secretary Rubio’s comments are incredibly misleading and disingenuous. At no point did these parents have any choice. They were not offered a choice: What do you want for your children? There weren’t offered the kind of opportunity to speak with each other and make what would have been a very difficult decision, but one that two parents are entitled to make together about what’s in the best interest of their family and what’s in the best interest of their children. These mothers were told, “Your children will be deported with you.” In our case, the government filed what was purported to be a handwritten note by our client’s mother that said, “I am bringing — I will bring my child with me.” That’s not a statement of wish. It’s not a statement of desire, of choice. It’s a statement that she was told, and that she was told to write.

AMY GOODMAN: So, at this point, what happens? I mean, it’s very interesting that you have the judge, Judge Doughty, Trump-appointed, who said there was no due process here.

GRACIE WILLIS: At this point, the families — the first thing that the families need to do is process what they’ve been through, the trauma they’ve been through, and attend to the safety and health of the family. There are safety and security concerns for some members of the family in Honduras, and so the families are making sure that they are somewhere safe. Secondly, attending to the health of the mother who’s pregnant, who’s in the early stages of a pregnancy, who’s been through a significant trauma, ensuring that she and her unborn child are as well as possible, and attending to health and well-being of the 4-year-old, who desperately needs medication and to continue treatment for his cancer. We have this —

AMY GOODMAN: Gracie, I want to ask you about this 4-year-old boy. He’s in fourth — he has 4th stage rare form of cancer. He is in the midst of his treatment. He is deported out of the country without medication. Can you explain his case, though you are not officially representing this U.S. citizen?

GRACIE WILLIS: That’s correct. We’re not attorneys on that case, but we’re working closely with the attorneys representing that family. This family was brought into detention less than 24 hours before the plane took off in the midmorning on Thursday. And the attorney who’s working with that family was actually with them at the ICE appointment where they were checking in. The kids were ready for school. They were expecting to go to school later that day. The family was taken into custody, asked for communication with their lawyer, who was outside, and were denied that.

That attorney filed what’s called an administrative stay of removal, which is a request for ICE to just temporarily halt any deportation in the interest of something happening. And in this case, the lawyer requested the opportunity to file paperwork, complicated paperwork, with the court to provide immigration options to the mother and especially to allow this 4-year-old to continue treatment. The attorney filed paperwork with ICE explaining what this child’s medical situation was, explaining the diagnosis, and didn’t receive any kind of a response until the family was already on a plane on Friday morning.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, it seems important to the Trump administration to keep maintaining that these kids, the child with 4th stage rare cancer, the 2-year-old, the 7-year-old, were not deported; they were simply attached to their mothers who were deported. Can you explain the difference between talking about deported and removed, when we’re talking about U.S. citizens?

GRACIE WILLIS: Absolutely. We’re in a situation with these two cases where we almost don’t have the right word for it. ICE has the authority to deport people who are deportable, who are removable, whether that’s because of finding of a judge or because somebody has accepted something called voluntary departure — anything that relates to somebody who’s not a citizen of the United States and is either inadmissible to the United States or deportable from the United States. We don’t really have great language around what it is to have an immigration agency send U.S. citizen people out of the country without any access to any way to contest that or express the option to stay in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Gracie Willis, we’ll closely follow these cases. Thanks so much for being with us from Austin, Texas, attorney with the National Immigration Project, representing the 2-year-old U.S. citizen who was deported from Louisiana early Friday morning to Honduras.

When we come back, the Trump administration escalates its attack on judges. On Friday, FBI agents arrested a Milwaukee judge. Stay with us.