A federal judge on Sunday temporarily blocked the deportation of some 600 Guatemalan children by the Trump administration. The order came as some of the children sat on flights waiting to take off for Guatemala. The judge said the government violated their rights to due process and ignored protections for minors who crossed the border alone.
Attorney Efren Olivares of the National Immigration Law Center said, “It defies any reason or logic, the cruelty of the most powerful, the richest country in the world, going after a seven-year-old and preventing him from even talking to a judge about his immigration case.”
However, the Trump administration insisted it was acting at Guatemala’s request to reunite those minors with their parents.
The ruling comes as President Trump is now threatening to deploy the National Guard in Chicago, in part over crime, in part over illegal immigration.
Speaking on Chicago crime, Trump said, “Everybody knows how bad it is.”
On Truth Social, Trump said Illinois Governor JB Pritzker was “crazy” for saying he doesn’t need federal help, and warned the Democrat governor to get control of the crime problem in Chicago, writing, “better straighten it out, fast, or we’re coming.”
Pritzker accused the White House of secretly planning an “invasion,” telling CBS, “They ought to let us know when they’re coming, where they’re coming, if it’s ICE or if it’s ATF or whoever it is. But they don’t want to do that either. Um, and I must say it’s disruptive. It’s dangerous. It tends to inflame passions on the ground when they don’t let us know what their plans are.”
Chicago’s mayor condemned any plan to surge federal officers into the nation’s third-largest city, and has barred his police department from helping federal authorities with civil immigration enforcement or any related patrols.
Mayor Brandon Johnson said, “We will not have our police officers, who are working hard every single day to drive down crime, deputized to do traffic stops and checkpoints for the president.”
Meanwhile, it’s been another bloody weekend of crime in Chicago, with 43 shot and 7 murdered.
U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro defended Trump’s Guard deployment to fight crime in cities, telling Fox, “What we need is to recognize that the first order of government is protection of its people…If anyone has a problem with that, then you know they’re not in compliance with the 81 percent of the American people who think crime is a major problem in large cities.”
