LGML v. Noem

In partnership with the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the National Center for Youth Law (NCYL), ICAP is challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to unlawfully expel hundreds of unaccompanied children from the United States. In the middle of the night on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, hundreds of children were unlawfully removed from their beds and put on planes to be deported to Guatemala, despite some having pending immigration proceedings. Before the planes were able to take off, the NILC filed suit to stop the removal, which resulted in an emergency hearing during which the judge granted a temporary restraining order stopping the planes.

We represent several individual unaccompanied children, as well as a class of similarly situated children, who have statutory and constitutional rights against summary expulsion.. Many of the children face a risk of abuse, neglect, persecution, or trafficking if they are returned to their home countries. The government initially assured the Court that the parents of each child it attempted to remove had requested that the child be returned to Guatemala–but the government was forced to withdraw that assertion when a report by the Guatemalan government and evidence presented in our case showed it to be false.

The district court granted our request for a provisional class and issued a preliminary injunction, finding that we are “very likely” to prevail on our argument that federal law prohibits the summary removal of unaccompanied children.