Homan said that having a child in the United States after entering illegally ‘is not a get out of jail free card.’
White House border czar Tom Homan said that illegal immigrant parents of children who are born in the United States are not immune from being deported.
Homan disputed the judge’s statement that the decision lacked due process.
The illegal immigrant mother “had due process at great taxpayer expense, and was ordered by an immigration judge after those hearings, so she had due process,” Homan said. He said that it was not the child who was being deported, but that the child’s mother chose to take the girl with her.
Elsewhere in the interview, Homan said it was the parents of the child who put her in that situation—not the Trump administration.
“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,” Homan said. “That’s not on this administration. If you choose to put your family in that position, that’s on them.”
He added that having a child in the United States after entering illegally “is not a get out of jail free card.”
“It doesn’t make you immune from our laws,” he said. “If that’s the message we send the entire world, women are going to keep putting themselves at risk and come to this country.”
He added: “We send a message: You can enter the country illegally—which is a crime, that’s okay—you can have due process, at great taxpayer expense, get ordered removed—that’s okay, don’t leave—But have a U.S. citizen child and you’re immune from removal? That’s not the way it works.”
Doughty scheduled a hearing in the case for May “in the interest of dispelling [the court’s] strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
“The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” Doughty also said in the order. “But the Court doesn’t know that.”
President Donald Trump, whose presidential campaigns have focused heavily on border security and illegal immigration, has issued a number of executive orders and issued directives aimed at removing millions of illegal immigrants who came in over the previous four years.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested 145,000 immigration violators during Trump’s first three months in office, up from 113,000 in all of fiscal 2024, officials with Homeland Security have said.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court temporarily barred the Trump administration from deporting a group of Venezuelan illegal immigrants the government accused of being gang members subject to removal under the Alien Enemies Act. The government has urged the justices to lift their order.
The high court issued the decision after lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union asked it to intervene on an emergency basis, saying dozens of Venezuelan illegal immigrants faced imminent deportation without the judicial review the justices previously ordered.
Reuters contributed to this report.
