Orlando-born twins, age 12, wrongly deported to Guatemala with their mother

Two 12-year-old sisters born in the United States were deported to Guatemala along with their mother earlier this week only to be returned the same day, with the twins forced to endure hours of flights in a legal maneuver the U.S. Attorney’s Office now concedes was unlawful.

“What’s going on in this country is shocking in a lot of ways, but this, to me, is just unacceptable behavior by human beings to treat children this way,” Senior District Judge Gregory Presnell said at a Tuesday hearing on the matter. “Whether the mother was subject to her removal or not is beside the point to me at this point.”

By the time of the hearing, the girls, born and raised in Orlando, and their mother, a Guatemalan national, had already been in Guatemala for hours and, unknown to the court, were being readied to return home.

The case began when the mother, Marly Morataya-Zepeda, was ordered to check-in Monday with Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the agency’s Orlando office.

“Bring your girls and documents,” she was told, court records show, though it wasn’t clear why until she got there.

When she arrived, she went inside the ICE office while the twins waited in the parking lot with their grandmother. Her daughters were then asked to come to the front door of the building.

There, the girls were arrested by an ICE officer.

By 8:15 a.m. Tuesday, the three were on a plane to Guatemala City. Hours earlier, however, attorneys for the family had filed a petition in federal court seeking to stop the girls’ removal. Their mother wanted the children to remain in Orlando with their grandmother or their father, both permanent residents.

Soon after arriving in Guatemala, the three then were flown back to the U.S., landing first in Texas on Tuesday evening and then at Orlando International Airport the following morning.

The family’s swift removal and return raises questions about ICE’s actions and its agents adherence to policies, the family’s attorneys said in court filings. ICE claimed they were following a “family-unity” policy, the documents show, but they ignored the wishes of the mother who wanted her girls to remain in the U.S.

That policy, known as ICE Directive 11064.4, prohibits the detention of minors unless they are the subject of immigration enforcement, which Morataya-Zepeda’s children were not, the family’s attorneys said. Parents and legal guardians taken into custody also must have the opportunity to arrange for another caretaker — and that did not happen, they added.

Attorneys Laura Hernandez, who represents the girls, and Ilia Garrity-Lopez, who represents the mother, called for a congressional investigation in a statement issued to the Orlando Sentinel.

“This is not a immigration dispute,” the statement said. “This is a constitutional crisis.”

In a court filing, they also called for ICE Director Todd Lyons and the office who arrested the trio, identified in open court as Christine Jaehne, to appear in court and explain the agency’s actions.

ICE did not respond to a message seeking comment on the deportation. The U.S. Attorney’s Office has until Friday to respond to the attorneys’ filings.

Since 2013, Morataya-Zepeda has been under an order for her removal, but it has not been enforced, and she has been allowed to stay in the country, records show. Since then, she made a life in the U.S. while periodically checking in with immigration authorities.

It is not clear what prompted them to take her into custody 13 years later, but the government has made an immigration crackdown a priority since President Donald Trump returned to office last year.

Garrity-Lopez, the attorney, was there when the family was arrested at the ICE office Monday. She said she did not know why the ICE agent insisted on seeing the 12-year-olds. As U.S. citizens, they didn’t have to appear at the appointment, as ICE does not have authority to detain Americans even when their parents are detained.

“I asked Jaehne the reason why she needed to see the children, and she told me that they had a flight scheduled for the three of them and that the children needed to leave with her, based on a family unity policy that ICE had, in order to remove the children with the mother,” Garrity-Lopez told Presnell on Tuesday, according to a transcript the Sentinel obtained.

On Thursday, Morataya-Zepeda made another visit to the ICE office, emerging later with the attorneys before heading to another office to be fitted with an ankle monitor.

She is temporarily allowed to return home, as are the twins. ICE intends to deport her in a month, records show, but her attorney plans to argue now that the agency has removed her and brought her back, the 2013 removal order is no longer valid.

The ongoing legal matter is the latest in a string of controversial immigration cases brought before federal judges across the U.S., including in Orlando. The vast majority of them have issued orders releasing migrants detained by ICE while admonishing the practices of the Trump administration, which wants to detain people indefinitely, even those without criminal records.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Yohance Pettis conceded the girls’ deportation to Guatemala was unlawful, and that federal authorities were looking to move quickly to facilitate their return, according to the hearing transcript.

Attorneys later noted that Morataya-Zepeda and the girls were already on the way home by the time of the hearing, after “ICE’s own attaché had unilaterally determined to return the entire family,” apparently after noticing the filed court petition demanding the government justify the twins’ detention.

The federal prosecutors did not mention the family was heading back to the U.S. during that hearing, however.

“This means that … the government either knew or had ready access to information that Ms. Morataya Zepeda was in the process of returning, yet said nothing,” an amended petition filed by the family’s attorneys said.

Along with seeking an explanation for ICE’s actions, the attorneys now aim to keep Morataya-Zepeda in the U.S. and hope a federal judge will agree.

“ICE has no identified legal basis for continuing to monitor, restrain or threaten to remove her,” their petition concluded.

No additional hearing has yet been scheduled.

________