Trump Administration Highlights: Government Deports 2-Year-Old U.S. Citizen to Honduras

“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” wrote Judge Doughty, a conservative Trump appointee. “But the court doesn’t know that.”

Asserting that “it is illegal and unconstitutional to deport” a U.S. citizen, Judge Doughty set a hearing for May 16 to explore his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

The case of V.M.L., which was reported earlier by Politico, is the latest challenge to the legality of several aspects of President Trump’s aggressive deportation efforts.

The administration has already been blocked by seven federal judges in courts across the country from removing Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members to El Salvador under a rarely invoked wartime statute. It has also created an uproar by wrongfully deporting a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador and so far refusing to work to bring him back.

According to court papers, the 2-year-old girl had accompanied her mother, Jenny Carolina Lopez Villela, and her older sister, Valeria, to an immigration appointment in New Orleans on Tuesday when they were taken into custody by officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Ms. Lopez Villela was scheduled for an expedited removal from the country on Friday. And in a filing to Judge Doughty, lawyers for the Justice Department claimed that she “made known to ICE officials that she wanted to retain custody of V.M.L. and for V.M.L. to go” with her to Honduras.

But in a petition filed by the child’s custodian, Trish Mack, on Thursday, her father claimed that when he spoke briefly with Ms. Lopez Villela, he could hear her and the children crying. The father reminded her, the petition said, that “their daughter was a U.S. citizen and could not be deported.”

The father, who was not identified by name in the petition, tried to give Ms. Lopez Villela the phone number for a lawyer, but he claims that officials cut short the call.

The detention of V.M.L. “is without any basis in law and violates her fundamental due process rights,” the petition said. “She seeks this court’s urgent action and asks the court to order her immediate release to her custodian Trish Mack, who is ready and waiting to take her home.”

Judge Doughty said in his order that he tried to investigate what had happened himself by trying to get Ms. Lopez Villela on the phone on Friday shortly after noon to “survey her consent and custodial rights.”

The judge expressed concern that a plane carrying the mother and her daughters was by then already “above the Gulf of America.” His suspicions were confirmed, he wrote, when a lawyer for the Justice Department told him at 1:06 p.m. that day that Ms. Lopez Villela and presumably her children “had just been released in Honduras.”

The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

The lawsuit centers on an April 3 memo the Trump administration sent to states, requiring them to certify that they do not use certain diversity, equity and inclusion programs that the administration has said are illegal.

States that did not certify risked losing federal funding for low-income students.

Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, said at a news conference on Friday that the Trump administration had distorted federal civil rights law to force states to abandon legal diversity programs.

“California hasn’t and won’t capitulate. Our sister states won’t capitulate,” Mr. Bonta said, adding that the Trump administration’s D.E.I. order was vague and impractical to enforce, and that D.E.I. programs are “entirely legal” under civil rights law.

The Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday evening.

The administration has argued that certain diversity programs in schools violate federal civil rights law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs that receive federal funding.

It has based its argument on the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling ending the use of race in college admissions, arguing that the decision applies to the use of race in education more broadly.

The administration has not offered a specific list of D.E.I. initiatives it deems illegal. But it has suggested that efforts to provide targeted academic support or counseling to specific groups of students amount to illegal segregation. And it has argued that lessons on concepts such as white privilege or structural racism, which posits that racism is embedded in social institutions, are discriminatory.

The lawsuit came a day after the Trump administration was ordered to pause any enforcement of its April 3 memo, in separate federal lawsuits brought by teachers’ unions and the N.A.A.C.P., among others.

Mr. Bonta said that the lawsuit by the 19 states brought forward separate claims and represented the “strong and unique interest” of states to ensure that billions of federal dollars appropriated by Congress reach students.

“We have different claims that we think are very strong claims,” he said.

Loss of federal funding would be catastrophic for students, said Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, an adversary of President Trump who previously won a civil fraud case against him.

She noted that school districts in Buffalo and Rochester rely on federal funds for nearly 20 percent of their revenue and said she was suing to “uphold our nation’s civil rights laws and protect our schools and the students who rely on them.”

Critics have said the law was already largely toothless, and officials in the first Trump administration were routinely accused of violating it, with little punishment meted out. And the changes do not roll back Hatch Act restrictions entirely, but do so in a way that uniquely benefits Mr. Trump: Visible support for candidates and their campaigns in the future is still banned, but support for the current officeholder is not.

The move may not violate the law, because it will not influence the outcome of an election, experts say. But it threatens to further politicize the government’s professional work force, which Mr. Trump has been seeking to bend to his will as he tests the bounds of executive power.

“This is a really dark day,” Kathleen Clark, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis and a government ethics lawyer, said in an interview on Friday. A president should work to ensure that the public knows the government is for everyone, she said.

“When you go into a Social Security office, if they’re still open, you will be treated the same whether you voted for the current president or not,” she said, referring to the government downsizing efforts since Mr. Trump returned to the Oval Office.

“This is another example of Trump grabbing hold, seizing control of the federal government’s power, as though it was his own system, instead of acknowledging that he has a role to play as a public servant,” Ms. Clark said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Office of Special Counsel issued other opinions on Friday that will weaken enforcement of the law, by removing an independent review board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, from its role reviewing claims of violations. The office — which historically was independent but is now led by a Trump official after Mr. Trump fired its leader, starting a bitter court fight — will review accusations and send findings to the White House, which is unlikely to take action against its own backers.

The Hatch Act has been in effect for more than 80 years. It was intended to prevent presidents from handing out patronage jobs and filling the administration with political cronies.

Allowing the workplace display of support comes as Mr. Trump takes steps to drastically increase the number of political appointees in the federal government, which would allow presidents to install more loyalists in senior positions — the very thing the authors of the Hatch Act sought to prevent.

Federal employees have been under significant stress, many fearing they may be fired as the administration carries out mass layoffs.

Now, Trump-appointed managers could be walking around wearing Trump-Vance gear, said Richard W. Painter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House.

“I think it’s destructive to allow it,” he said.

Hampton Dellinger, the Senate-confirmed head of the Office of Special Counsel until Mr. Trump fired him, said, “Keeping partisan politics out of government services has benefited all Americans, particularly taxpayers, for generations.”

During the first Trump administration, several of his top advisers were accused of violating the law, including Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, who was cited as a “repeat offender.” Mr. Trump refused to fire her.

The Massapequa district, whose “Chiefs” logo depicts an illustrated side profile of a Native American man in a feathered headdress, is one of several that have resisted making a change.

The name of the town, a middle-class swath of the South Shore where most residents voted for Mr. Trump in the November election, was derived from the Native American word “Marspeag” or “Mashpeag,” which means “great water land.”

In announcing the investigation, Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said that her department would “not stand by as the state of New York attempts to rewrite history and deny the town of Massapequa the right to celebrate its heritage in its schools.”

JP O’Hare, a spokesman for the state Education Department, said in a statement that state education officials had not been contacted by the federal government about the matter.

“However,” he added, “the U.S. Department of Education’s attempt to interfere with a state law concerning school district mascots is inconsistent with Secretary McMahon’s March 20, 2025, statement that she is ‘sending education back to the states, where it so rightly belongs.’”

The policy, introduced in 2022, was adopted amid a national push to change Native American mascot names or iconography through legislation and other moves.

When the ban was adopted, about five dozen New York school districts still used Native American-inspired mascots and logos. Districts were given until the end of June this year to eliminate banned mascots.

Since taking office for his second term, Mr. Trump and his administration have waged a relentless campaign against what they argue are illegal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and have threatened entities that do not fall in line and eliminate such efforts.

The president has said he would slash funding for low-income students in states that fail to do away with such programs. New York’s Education Department was the first to publicly refuse to comply with the order.

Massapequa school leaders filed a federal lawsuit seeking to keep the “Chiefs” name, but the judge in the case recently moved closer to dismissing it after finding they had failed to provide sufficient evidence for their claims, including that the mascot qualified as protected speech.

In a social media post this week, Mr. Trump criticized New York’s policy and called for Ms. McMahon to intervene.

“Forcing them to change the name, after all of these years, is ridiculous and, in actuality, an affront to our great Indian population,” the president wrote.

In a statement included in the federal Education Department’s announcement, Kerry Watcher, the Massapequa Board of Education president, welcomed the investigation.

“Attempts to erase Native American imagery do not advance learning,” Ms. Watcher said. “They distract from our core mission of providing a high-quality education grounded in respect, history and community values.”

Mr. Walczak’s mother, Elizabeth Fago, who was also involved in the health care industry in Florida, is a longtime Republican donor and fund-raiser who played a role in a surreptitious effort to help Mr. Trump by undermining Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 presidential election.

During the campaign, Ms. Fago was contacted by a man who was in possession of a diary kept by Mr. Biden’s daughter, Ashley, as she recovered from addiction, The New York Times previously reported.

When first told of the diary, Ms. Fago said she thought it would help Mr. Trump’s chances of winning the election if it was made public, two people familiar with the matter later told The Times. The man, Robert Kurlander, circulated the diary at a fund-raiser at Ms. Fago’s house in Jupiter, Fla., in September 2020.

Ms. Fago’s daughter passed along a tip about the diary to Project Veritas, a conservative group that had become a favorite of Mr. Trump’s. Project Veritas later paid $40,000 to Mr. Kurlander and an associate, Aimee Harris, for the diary.

The Justice Department investigated the theft and handling of the diary, which included scrutiny of Ms. Fago and her daughter. Neither they nor anyone from Project Veritas was charged, but Mr. Kurlander and Ms. Harris were convicted in connection with the scheme.

There is no evidence that Mr. Walczak was involved in the effort to acquire the diary, and the charges against him were unrelated to the matter.

He had donated a total of about $450 to Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign around the time of the fund-raiser at his mother’s home, but it is not clear whether he attended it.

Asked about the pardon, he declined to comment and did not respond to a follow-up message inquiring about the diary. Ms. Fago, who has donated more than $16,000 to Mr. Trump’s committees and was nominated by him in December 2020 to the National Cancer Advisory Board, did not respond to a request for comment.

The pardon of Mr. Walczak comes as Mr. Trump is increasingly using his nearly unfettered clemency powers to reward allies, highlight his grievances about what he sees as the political weaponization of the justice system and swipe at perceived enemies, including the Bidens.

Last month, Mr. Trump granted clemency to Devon Archer and Jason Galanis. The men are former business partners of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter, and earned fans on the political right by testifying to Republican-controlled congressional committees about the overlap between the younger Mr. Biden’s business dealings and the elder Mr. Biden’s public service.

Raymond R. Granger, a lawyer who represented Mr. Walczak in his criminal tax case, confirmed that he had drafted the pardon application with assistance from two lawyers with whom he worked on the case, Richard Levitt and Dennis Kainen.

In a statement, Mr. Granger said “Paul and his family are truly grateful to the president, and Paul looks forward to returning his focus to his lifelong passion for improving the country’s health care system.”

The clemency grant for Mr. Walczak came on the same day as Mr. Trump issued a pardon to Michele Fiore, a Nevada Republican politician who was convicted last year in connection with a scheme to use charitable donations for personal expenses, including plastic surgery, rent and her daughter’s wedding.

A White House official said, without providing evidence, that Mr. Walczak and Ms. Fiore had been the victims of biased prosecutions under the Biden Justice Department.

“An opinion explaining the court’s reasoning will be issued within the next few days,” Judge Friedman wrote in the two-page order.

The order, if implemented, would strip collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers, effectively banning them from joining unions.

Those unions have been a major obstacle in Mr. Trump’s effort to slash the size of the federal work force and reshape the government. With every stroke of the pen from Mr. Trump enacting new orders aimed at tightening control over the federal bureaucracy, federal worker unions have responded with lawsuits, winning at least temporary reprieves for some fired federal workers and blocking efforts to dismantle portions of the government.

Mr. Trump had framed his order stripping workers of labor protections as critical to protect national security. But the union noted that it targeted agencies across the government, some of which had no obvious national security portfolio, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency.

“The administration’s own issuances show that the president’s exclusions are not based on national security concerns,” the suit said, “but, instead, a policy objective of making federal employees easier to fire and political animus against federal sector unions.”

From his first days in the White House in 2017, President Trump has complained bitterly about leaks of all kinds. Mr. Trump himself faced criminal indictment for allegedly mishandling classified information after he left the White House, in a case that was ultimately dismissed.

Given Mr. Trump’s confrontational approach to the press, First Amendment advocates have long expected his administration to rescind Biden-era protections for journalists. But the vague phrasing of the new memo at times appeared to call for more than simply restoring past policy.

The Bondi memo said federal prosecutors “will continue to employ procedural protections to limit the use of compulsory legal process to obtain information from or records of members of the news media.” In the past, such protections have included requiring senior-level Justice Department approvals before seeking court orders for such information. The memo did not describe the protections.

The Justice Department, Ms. Bondi wrote, “will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.” Even if the Trump administration were to pursue leak investigations beyond the traditional ambit of classified information in order to get a warrant, prosecutors would still have to convince judges that a crime might have been committed.

Bruce D. Brown, the president of the advocacy group Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said that some of the most important reporting in U.S. history had come from reporters using confidential sources.

“Strong protections for journalists serve the American public by safeguarding the free flow of information,” he said.

The Justice Department has typically shied away from prosecuting journalists for merely possessing classified information. When prosecutors have sought reporters’ data, it has nearly always been part of an effort to identify and prosecute the person who gave the reporters the information. But the main criminal statute that governs such cases dates back to World War I, and is broadly worded.

The Bondi memo says that Justice Department officials, when deciding whether to use court orders aimed at journalists, will consider whether there are “reasonable grounds to believe that a crime has occurred and the information sought is essential to a successful prosecution,” and whether prosecutors have made all other reasonable attempts to get the information.

Prosecutors must also consider whether “absent a threat to national security, the integrity of the investigation or bodily harm,” the government has pursued negotiations with the journalist in question.

Federal employees are typically required to return their government-issued devices, in part to reduce the security risk of leaving potentially sensitive information with workers whose service has been terminated. The letter stipulates that devices will not be marked as “disposed” until they have been remotely wiped. It makes no request that the employees dispose of the devices.

There is also no clear deadline stipulated in the email, which says merely that devices will be remotely sanitized “on or around the employee Reduction in Force (RIF) date.” Staff based in the United States have been told that their employment will end by Aug. 15, which is also the date by which U.S.A.I.D.’s foreign service officers are expected to return to the United States.

The email also says that the administration will reach out to U.S.A.I.D. contractors who were fired weeks ago to let them know how to wipe their devices remotely.

With the planned closure of the agency, it was not clear what the government might have done with the returned devices. But their collective value is potentially significant.

Before President Trump returned to office in January and began cutting the work force, U.S.A.I.D. had over 10,000 employees. Though it was not immediately clear how many devices employees were issued, the value of the devices could reach into the millions of dollars.

Press officers for U.S.A.I.D. and the State Department did not immediately return requests for comment.

A statement issued on behalf of Judge Dugan late Friday stated that she “will defend herself vigorously and looks forward to being exonerated.” She has hired a former federal prosecutor to represent her, the statement said, and “has committed herself to the rule of law and the principles of due process for her entire career as a lawyer and a judge.”

Judge Dugan, widely known in progressive circles in Milwaukee, was elected by a wide margin in 2016, beating an incumbent appointee of Scott Walker, the Republican former governor of Wisconsin. Judge Dugan was unopposed for re-election in 2022. Her current term expires in 2028.

In 2023, she dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Republican Party of Wisconsin that argued a get-out-the-vote effort in Milwaukee violated the law.

Judge Dugan, 65, graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1987 and took a job at Legal Action of Wisconsin, a group that provides free legal services. She worked as a lawyer specializing in housing, public benefits and Social Security cases, and was the coordinator of the organization’s pro bono attorney program from 1990 to 1994, according to her LinkedIn page.

She later worked as the executive director for Catholic Charities of Southeastern Wisconsin. Judge Dugan has also served on the Milwaukee County Ethics Board.

As a lawyer for Legal Aid, Judge Dugan took on cases defending the indigent. In 1995, she represented people who panhandled on downtown sidewalks, arguing that banning them from doing so was unconstitutional.

In 2000, she argued that a surge in tickets written for “quality-of-life” issues had resulted in intimidation.

“Anecdotally, from my clients, people don’t want to go to court, much less to trial, because they’ve been particularly intimidated by officers,” she told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at the time. “We’ve seen an increase in complaints of harassment and abuse.”

Judge Dugan lost a judicial race in 2012. During the campaign, she said she was nonpartisan and would be impartial, according to the Journal Sentinel.

“Justice is hard work. Everyone knows that,” she said.

Julius Kim, a criminal defense lawyer in Milwaukee who has known Judge Dugan for years, said on Friday that she is known for advocating on behalf of people who are “underrepresented in the justice system.”

“Social justice issues are close to her heart,” he said. “But that being said, I don’t think she’s known by any stretch to be any kind of pushover in the courthouse, either. I think she takes her obligations seriously as a judge.”

In 2021, Judge Dugan was a finalist in the “Most Trusted Public Official” category in the Best of Milwaukee contest in The Shepherd Express, an alternative publication.

In an article she wrote that year detailing the history of women in Wisconsin’s legal profession, Judge Dugan noted that a “passion project” of hers was to have her picture taken outside of every courthouse in Wisconsin.

Local officials in Milwaukee criticized her arrest.

Mayor Cavalier Johnson of Milwaukee said that “it sends a chilling effect to other people who participate in our judicial process here in Milwaukee.

“When folks do not participate in the judicial process, that makes our community less safe,” he said.

David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, said in a statement that Judge Dugan is “entitled to her constitutional right to due process.”

“However, it is clear that the F.B.I. is politicizing this situation to make an example of her and others across the country who oppose their attack on the judicial system and our nation’s immigration laws,” he said.

Outside the federal courthouse in Milwaukee on Friday afternoon, dozens of people gathered in protest of Judge Dugan’s arrest. Some called it an attack on the judiciary by the Trump administration, carrying signs reading “Hands off our judges.”

“If we don’t stand up now, we’ll lose the chance to,” said Jenica Wolski, 37, a graphic artist from the nearby suburb of Wauwatosa. “We are sliding so fast into authoritarianism, it’s scary.”

Dan Simmons and Robert Chiarito contributed reporting from Milwaukee.

With the notable exception of the United States, nearly every country in the world is party to a treaty on marine and maritime activities that went into force in 1994, called the Law of the Sea Convention. That the United States has never ratified the treaty is in part what allowed Mr. Trump to unilaterally decide that the government could issue permits for mining the seabed in areas beyond American territorial jurisdiction.

The White House has argued that extracting critical minerals such as cobalt and nickel from nodules on the ocean floor is crucial to its supply of metals that go into a plethora of advanced technologies. On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency that will be tasked with issuing seabed mining permits, said the Trump administration had unlocked “the next gold rush.”

Dozens of countries have called for a moratorium on seabed mining, and even those, like China, who have been keen to see seabed mining take place, have urged restraint until the International Seabed Authority, an agency created under the treaty, agrees on rules for how companies can go about extracting minerals from the deep sea.

Many scientists see deep-sea mining as environmentally risky. It has never been done at commercial scale before, and the deep sea is one of the planet’s least understood ecosystems.

Many countries rebuked the Trump administration’s embrace of seabed mining several weeks ago, when a Canadian mining outfit, the Metals Company, announced that its American subsidiary would apply directly to the U.S. government for a permit for deep-sea mining in international waters.

Environmental groups expressed outrage over the executive order.

“Trump is trying to open one of Earth’s most fragile and least understood ecosystems to reckless industrial exploitation,” said Emily Jeffers, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The deep ocean belongs to everyone and protecting it is humanity’s global duty. The sea floor environment is not a platform for ‘America First’ extraction.”

Companies have been exploring the seabed for minerals for more than a decade. The richest zone they have found is in the Eastern Pacific, in an area called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which occupies a vast span under the ocean between Mexico and Hawaii.

Permitting in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone would be handled by the Commerce Department, through NOAA, which has been hit by large scale cuts to its funding and work force since Mr. Trump took office.

“NOAA provides Americans with accessible and accurate weather forecasts; it tracks hurricanes and tsunamis; it responds to oil spills; it keeps seafood on the table; and so much more,” said Jeff Watters at the nonprofit group Ocean Conservancy. “Forcing the agency to carry out deep-sea mining permitting while these essential services are slashed will only harm our ocean and our country.”