A federal judge on Thursday ordered the U.S. government to return three migrant families affected by the family separation policy during President Trump’s first administration and then deported under his second, declaring the deportations “unlawful.”
U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, ruled that the families’ deportations violated a court settlement designed to provide certain benefits to those affected by the first Trump administration’s policy of forcibly separating migrant children from their parents along the U.S.-Mexico border.
That infamous weeks-long policy was scrapped in 2018 amid legal challenges and widespread public outcry. In 2023, the Biden administration entered into a court settlement in which the U.S. government committed to offering certain benefits to the families impacted by the policy and limiting the ability for officials to carry out a similar practice in the future.
“Although the Settlement Agreement does not prohibit Defendants from enforcing the laws of the United States, the removals at issue here clearly violated the spirit of the Agreement, which was to effect and support reunification in the United States of families that had been separated pursuant to the family separation policy,” Sabraw wrote in his ruling.
“Defendants’ decision to remove these families rendered the benefits of the Settlement Agreement illusory for these families, and the manner in which each of these removals was affected, in addition to being unlawful, involved lies, deception, and coercion,” he continued.
In a statement to CBS News on Friday, Lee Gelernt, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing thousands of migrant families forcibly separated under the first Trump administration, hailed Sabraw’s order.
“The Trump administration not only cruelly separated these families during the first term but now is again deporting and re-separating these same families,” Gelernt added. “The Court said enough is enough and ordered the Trump administration to bring back the families and to do so at government expense.”
In his ruling, Sabraw described three families he found had been wrongfully deported. All three cases involved mothers who had been directly or indirectly affected by the family separation policy.
One of them, he wrote, had been “forcibly separated from her daughter in 2018 pursuant to the first Trump Administration’s family separation policy.” The girl was 5 years old at the time, according to court records.
In that case, Sabraw said the mother was pressured multiple times last year to self-deport by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. She alleged in a declaration cited by Sabraw that one ICE officer suggested her children would be sent to “foster care or adoption” if she did not self-deport, and that a team of agency officers went to her house once.
“One officer said they would facilitate my voluntary departure if I was not planning to deport on my own,” she wrote in a declaration referenced by Sabraw. “Overwhelmed, depressed and frustrated, I told the officers they might as well ‘send me back’ because I had no other options here.”
Sabraw found that the mother and her three children “did not voluntarily depart the United States” and that they had instead been deported, despite having temporary permission to be in the U.S. through a grant of immigration parole. He also said they were removed weeks after he ordered the government in June 2025 to pause any deportations of families eligible for benefits under the court settlement.
Sabraw said the other two cases entailed “strikingly similar” patterns, and ordered the Trump administration to pay for the families’ return.
In a statement Saturday, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said the administration disagreed with Sabraw’s ruling, which it argued interfered with the president’s deportation powers.
“The facts and truth remain the same: these individuals were here illegally,” McLaughlin added. “DHS will continue to enforce the law of the land and address this matter with the court.”
