Attorney General Pam Bondi, right, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem listen as President Donald Trump speaks before signing an executive order about the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus, Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson).
A DOJ lawyer acknowledged during a hearing Wednesday that one of her colleagues made representations to a federal judge that she could not back up. The admission comes after attorneys who had successfully blocked Labor Day weekend deportations of “unaccompanied” minors showed through documentation that the assertion that “all of these children have their parents or guardians in Guatemala who are requesting their return” wasn”t actually true.
As Law&Crime reported at the outset on the case of L.G.M.L. et al. v. Kristi Noem, the Trump administration planned over the holiday weekend to carry out hundreds of deportations and had planes loaded and reportedly sitting on a tarmac, but attorneys for the plaintiffs swiftly moved to block that action in federal court. What resulted was  U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s issuance of a temporary restraining order (TRO) early that Sunday morning.
Sooknanan, appointed by President Joe Biden and narrowly confirmed in December 2024, held a hearing that afternoon. During the hearing, DOJ attorney Drew Ensign claimed that the government of Guatemala “requested the return of these children, and all of these children have their parents or guardians in Guatemala who are requesting” their return.
At that hearing, as Lawfare’s Anna Bower reported in detail in real-time and in the aftermath, a National Immigration Law Center attorney for the would-be class action plaintiffs said that, on the contrary, certain minors feared returning to Guatemala, that their parents had not sought their return, and that Congress in any event has “created a special statutory scheme to ensure that unaccompanied minors receive enhanced protection and care whenever the government seeks to remove them from the United States.”
Unlike in another high-profile deportation case, the government complied with the TRO, and when Sooknanan’s Labor Day weekend emergency duty was over, the case was reassigned to U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Donald Trump appointee.
Since that time, the plaintiffs submitted documentation from the government of Guatemala and its National Attorney General’s Office that directly undercut what Ensign had said in support of the Trump administration’s efforts to move forward with the deportations.
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The exhibit filed Monday stated the Guatemalan government in August “conducted home visits and issued reports, and was able to prepare psychosocial or investigation reports for the families of 115 adolescents.”
Guatemala said it “found” that “50 family resources (parents) who were willing to welcome back their children if they were to return, with the caveat that none of them was requesting their return, indicating their desire to consider first the viability of the children staying in the United States.”
“It should be noted that in one of the reports, the parents stated that if their daughter were to return, they would do everything possible to get her out of the country again, because she had received death threats and therefore could not live in this country,” the report continued, before stating that dozens of other parents “expressed annoyance when this Office went to their residences, rejecting the request to conduct an assessment, sometimes in an intimidating manner.”
The discrepancy came to a head on Wednesday in Kelly’s court during a preliminary injunction hearing, as the judge questioned DOJ attorney Sarah Welch about whether the government was still standing by its claims that “all” of the children’s parents were requesting their return to Guatemala.
To that end, Judge Kelly notes that Drew Ensign told Judge Sooknanan that all of the parents requested the return of the children. He cites a Guatemalan government report, published by Reuters days later, which says that none of the parents requested/wanted their return.
— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) September 10, 2025 at 2:34 PM
Welch basically says she can’t make any representations on that point. The audio is poor, but she says something to the effect that a record hasn’t been developed on that point.
— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) September 10, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Judge asks if he should treat the government’s earlier representation as withdrawn. Welch says she can’t make representations on that point.
Judge Kelly says ok, so I should treat that as withdrawn.
Then he asks if the gov’s plans have changed based on info that parents didn’t request return.
— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) September 10, 2025 at 2:40 PM
Welch, according to Bower, stated she “can’t affirmatively represent that” what Ensign said “is correct” and thus agreed to withdraw it.
Politico reported that Welch also said it was “unfortunate that the children were frightened and pulled out in the middle of the night.”
