In a Labor Day weekend showdown, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting 76 unaccompanied Guatemalan children back home.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s Sunday emergency order blocked the deportations for up to two weeks. Sooknanan, a Biden administration appointee, granted the order after learning that more than six dozen of the minors were put on a plane bound for Guatemala.
U.S. officials insist they followed the law and were reuniting the Guatemalan children with parents or guardians who sought their return.
“Judge Sparkle Sooknanap [sic] is blocking flights to *reunify* Guatemalan children with their families. Now these children have to go to shelters. This is disgusting and immoral,” Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, wrote on X Monday.
Judge Sparkle Sooknanap is blocking flights to *reunify* Guatemalan children with their families.
Now these children have to go to shelters.
This is disgusting and immoral. https://t.co/vIunZV6YFL
— Tricia McLaughlin (@TriciaOhio) September 1, 2025
Attorneys with the National Immigration Law Center, who represent some of the children, sought the temporary restraining order over the holiday weekend.
They made a new request Wednesday for a longer-term injunction to protect unaccompanied minors with pending asylum cases, arguing they could face neglect or persecution at home, Fox News Digital reported.
Moving forward, U.S. Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, will oversee the case. Kelly has set a hearing for Sept. 10 over the migrants’ attorneys new request for a preliminary injunction, per Fox News. The Trump administration has until Sept. 6 to oppose the request.
The latest Trump-versus-activist-judge legal drama unfolded Sunday after the U.S. government loaded children onto planes to be flown back to their native Guatemala.
The children who came to the U.S. as unaccompanied migrant children were going to be reunited with their family members, according to government officials.
With the planes on the tarmac in Harlingen, Texas — and the youngsters still inside — Sooknanan ruled from a courtroom in Washington, D.C., that they could not leave.
Sooknanan imposed an immediate restraining order on the Trump administration to stop the removals. The migrants’ attorneys said trafficking and immigration laws “prevent unaccompanied children from being whisked off under cover of darkness at the whim of any government.”
The attorneys claim the Guatemalan minors have pending asylum cases or other legal claims that had not fully been vetted by the courts. Their clients range from 10 to 17 years old and have no legal guardians in the United States, attorneys said.
The children’s attorneys said authorities were violating U.S. laws and the minors’ due process rights. They allege sending them back to Guatemala puts them at risk of “grave and irreparable harm.”
Federal authorities “woke children in the night and subjected them to the trauma of imminent removal,” the attorneys wrote when seeking the temporary restraining order.
“But for this Court’s intervention while the plane sat on the tarmac in Texas, those children would have been expelled to Guatemala,” they said in court papers.
Sooknanan called an emergency hearing, moving it from 3 p.m. to 12:30 p.m. Sunday, after the court was notified the Guatemalan children were “in the process of being removed from the U.S,” ABC News reported.
Sooknanan ordered the U.S. government to get the minors off the plane and return them to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.
The judge demanded status updates from the U.S. Department of Justice every few hours until the process was complete. The DOJ complied with her orders, Fox News Digital reported.
NBC News reported Sooknanan updated the order Sunday afternoon, barring the U.S. government from removing any unaccompanied Guatemalan minors in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement who aren’t subject to final orders of removal for 14 days, absent a court order.
The children were deplaned and returned to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement Sunday evening, according to Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign, per ABC News.
“The government of Guatemala has requested the return of these children and all of these children have their parents or guardians in Guatemala who are requesting their return, and United States government is trying to facilitate the return of these children to their parents or guardians from whom they have been separated,” Ensign said.
In a statement Sunday, the Guatemalan government said it was working to repatriate unaccompanied teens as part of a proposal it made to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a recent visit.
“With the purpose of preventing a vulnerable group of adolescents in shelters and close to reaching adulthood from being sent to detention centers in the United States, the Government of Guatemala reinforces coordinated actions to contribute to their family reunification in Guatemala, once they have complied with the due process in that country,” the government statement said.
Guatemalan President Bernardo Arevalo said at a news conference Monday the government wanted to prevent those children “from being in a situation that would place them in this type of ICE centers,” NBC News reported.
The Guatemalan government said it would help with the process of family reunification and assume responsibility for the protection and well-being of the kids. Arevalo said the country could receive around 150 children per week in order to track down the families and return them safely.
“The decision of the shipment, of the number they are going to send, of the rhythm they are going to send is a decision that is partly in the hands of the American government and as you can see, it is currently in a judicial dispute,” he said, per NBC News.
The children’s attorneys have refuted the U.S. government’s claim that it’s reuniting kids with parents or guardians who sought their return. They argue that authorities still must follow a legal process that they did not, per NBC News.
The lawsuit that prompted the emergency order was brought by 10 underage Guatemalan migrants who were living in the country without a guardian or documentation.
In court documents, their attorneys claim they are “vulnerable children” entitled to “enhanced protection and care.” The attorneys argued the Trump administration was blowing past laws and the Constitution in an effort to illegally deport them, Fox News Digital reported.
Sooknanan granted a class action lawsuit so that the case would cover not just the 10 plaintiffs but all other minors similarly in the custody of HHS. The lawyers say about 600 minors are at risk of being abruptly removed from the country.
