Tonight, dozens of Guatemalan migrant children are back in federal custody after a late-night

court order temporarily halted their deportation. The ruling came after the unaccompanied

minors had already been boarded on planes bound for Guatemala. Lawyers filed an emergency motion

overnight, prompting the judge to be awakened at 2.30 Sunday morning to intervene, saying,

quote, I have the government attempting to remove unaccompanied minors from the country in the

wee hours of the morning on a holiday weekend, which is surprising. For now, a temporary

restraining order blocks the deportations of hundreds of such children for at least two weeks.

We're joined now by Kikamatoz, president of the National Immigration Law Center, which is

representing some of the migrant children. Welcome back to the program.

Thank you for having me.

So the U.S. has deported unaccompanied migrant children before.

So what makes this case in particular stand out?

What makes this case stand out in the most egregious ways is that our government, in the

dead of night, ordered the shelters to wake these children up between 2 and 4 o'clock in the

morning, to put them on buses so that they could be transported to Texas,

the airport, loaded on planes, and deported to Guatemala without making sure that these kids avail themselves

of the legal protections and the constitutional rights that they have. Now, understand, none of these

kids had received a final deportation order. These are kids whose cases are going through the system.

And our government decided that they were going to simply yank away these legal and constitutional

protections and send them to Guatemala.

The youngest kid that we spoke with is seven years old.

These are all unaccompanied children who are particularly vulnerable.

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