Three children, who are US citizens aged 2, 4, and 7 years, deported by immigration authorities; one of them has cancer

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have in recent days deported the Cuban-born mother of a 1-year-old girl — separating them indefinitely — and three children ages 2, 4 and 7 who are U.S. citizens along with their Honduran-born mothers, their lawyers said Saturday.

The three cases raise questions about who is being deported, and why, and come amid a battle in federal courts over whether President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has gone too far and too quickly at the expense of fundamental rights.

Lawyers in the cases described how the women were arrested at routine check-ins at ICE offices, given virtually no opportunity to speak with lawyers or their family members and then deported within three days or less.

The American Civil Liberties Union, National Immigration Project and several other allied groups said in a statement that the way ICE deported children who are U.S. citizens and their mothers is a “shocking — although increasingly common — abuse of power."

Gracie Willis of the National Immigration Project said the mothers, at the very least, did not have a fair opportunity to decide whether they wanted the children to stay in the United States.

“We have no idea what ICE was telling them, and in this case what has come to light is that ICE didn’t give them another alternative,” Willis said in an interview. “They didn’t gave them a choice, that these mothers only had the option to take their children with them despite loving caregivers being available in the United States to keep them here."

The 4-year-old — who is suffering from a rare form of cancer — and the 7-year-old were deported to Honduras within a day of being arrested with their mother, Willis said.

In the case involving the 2-year-old, a federal judge in Louisiana raised questions about the deportation of the girl, saying the government did not prove it had done so properly.

Lawyers for the girl’s father insisted he wanted the girl to remain with him in the U.S., while ICE contended the mother had wanted the girl to be deported with her to Honduras, claims that weren’t fully vetted by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in Louisiana.

Doughty in a Friday order scheduled a hearing on May 16 “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process,” he wrote.

The Honduran-born mother — who is pregnant — was arrested Tuesday on an outstanding deportation order along with the 2-year-old girl and her 11-year-old Honduran-born sister during a check-in appointment at an ICE office in New Orleans, lawyers said. The family lived in Baton Rouge.

Doughty called government lawyers on Friday to speak to the woman while she was in the air on a deportation plane, only to be called back less than an hour later and told that a conversation was impossible because she “had just been released in Honduras.”

In a Thursday court filing, lawyers for the father said ICE indicated that it was holding the 2-year-old girl in a bid to induce the father to turn himself in. His lawyers didn’t describe his immigration status, but said he has legally delegated the custody of his daughters to his sister-in-law, a U.S. citizen who also lives in Baton Rouge.

(This story has not been edited by DNA staff and is published from AP/PTI).