Bob Unruh dutifully spun for the Trump administration in a Sept. 1 article:
Federal judges are getting better at stopping jet flights returning foreigners to their home.
This time, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ordered jets not to take off that were part of a program by the administration of President Donald Trump to repatriate children from Guatemala to their home country, and families.
[…]This time, the judge ordered the flights not to take off, leaving some children sitting in the aircraft on the runway.
A report at RedState explained the Trump administration was sending illegal alien Guatemalan children back to their home country, after requests by Guatemala and their parents.
That wasn’t good enough for Sooknanan.
She issued a temporary restraining order halting the repatriation efforts “even as kids were already sitting in their seats.”
The Trump administration had hoped to reunite nearly 700 kids with parents or guardians in Guatemala.
The judge stepped into the program and shut it down after “charter buses had already rolled up to planes in Harlingen and El Paso and, in some cases, children were seated on board awaiting departure,” the report said.
Drew Ensign, a lawyer for the Department of Justice, said, “These are not removals under the statute. These are repatriations. All of these children have parents or guardians in Guatemala who have requested their return.”
But it turns out that Ensign was lying. As Politco reported:
Many of the administration’s claims, [U.S. District Judge Tim Kelly] noted, fell apart quickly when the Guatemalan government reported that it was unable to locate most of the children’s parents, and those it could find said they had not sought their children’s return and preferred for them to seek economic opportunity in the United States.
Kelly repeatedly chided the administration for making the baseless claim.
“While Defendants plunged ahead in the middle of the night with their ‘reunification’ plan and then represented to a judge that a parent or guardian had requested each child’s return, that turned out not to be true,” he wrote. “On this record, it appears that Defendants intend to send back to Guatemala many unaccompanied children without an identified parent or legal guardian there.”
Advocates for the Guatemalan children targeted for deportation described intense fear and anguish about the operation, saying their clients were roused in the middle of the night, some pulled from foster homes over their protests and bused to the airport.
[…]The Justice Department has provided little explanation for the apparent misstatements to the court. The senior DOJ attorney who made the claims at the Aug. 31 Zoom hearing, Drew Ensign, did not attend the court session last week where Kelly heard arguments on the requested injunction.
At that session, another DOJ lawyer, Sarah Welch, said Ensign’s earlier assertion was “withdrawn.” She also expressed some regret about the way the operation was handled. “It was unfortunate that the children were frightened and pulled out in the middle of the night,” Welch said.
Unruh went on to whine that “Sooknanan claimed her order was justified because the plan to return the children was happening in the “wee hours” of a holiday weekend.” But no explanation was given why this attempted operation had to be conducted in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend.
Unruh has not reported on the full story of this botched operation. Instead, he spent the rest of his article railing against a different judge for attempting to stop a similar operation earlier this year, maliciously portraying him as “a threat to the rule of law” for doing so.