"We send a 5-year-old back to Honduras? And they call that homeland security? That’s outrageous," Sen. Bob Casey said in an interview. | AP Photo Casey blasts Trump administration over child deportation

Sen. Bob Casey ripped the Trump administration on Wednesday over its immigration policies after frantically tweeting about a case of a mother and son being deported back to Honduras and urging the White House to intervene.

“This is outrageous. This is the United States of America. We send a 5 -year-old back to Honduras? And they call that homeland security? That’s outrageous. Absolutely outrageous,” Casey , a Pennsylvania Democrat, said in an interview with POLITICO. “There is no excuse for it, there’s nothing under the law that requires us to do that. They’re doing this with impunity. So we’re going to keep fighting it.”


The furious Casey, usually one of the more placid personalities in the Senate, said he reached out to both Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Thomas Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but that neither had returned his messages.

The Pennsylvania senator was told by Kelly’s assistant that the Homeland chief was in a meeting when he called — even though Casey requested that Kelly step out of the meeting because the matter was “urgent.”

“They’ve just allowed ICE to run wild. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of constraint,” Casey said in the interview. “If they are really, with limited resources, gonna focus on 5-year-olds instead of criminals, what kind of homeland security is that?”

Casey’s tweets were an unusual and, it appears, unsuccessful experiment in which a lawmaker tried to hold government officials accountable for their actions in real time. As he tweeted, Casey discovered that federal immigration officers already had put the family on a flight to their home country. Casey had complained that the administration refused to tell him which flight the two were on.

DHS spokesman David Lapan said the mother had exhausted every legal avenue to try and stay in the United States, including two immigration agencies within the Justice Department, the 3 rd Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court.

She was detained after trying to enter the country illegally Dec. 17, 2015, Lapan said, and on Wednesday, was "removed without incident pursuant to the lawfully issued removal order." DHS and ICE officials provided the name of the woman, but POLITICO is not printing it following requests from her lawyers, who say her safety is at risk.

"It's unfortunate that politicians are repeating misleading information and in the process, demonizing the men and women whose job it is to enforce the laws Congress writes," added Liz Johnson, assistant director of public affairs at ICE.

But the woman's attorneys disagreed that the mother and her son had exhausted their appeals — arguing that their cases had been dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, not on their merits.

One lawyer on the case said the flight was scheduled to touch down in Honduras on Wednesday afternoon, and that such deportation flights typically landed in the cities of Tegucigalpa or San Pedro Sula. The mother and son's legal team said they began the process of applying for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status — a program meant to aid immigrant children who have been abused, abandoned or neglected — for the boy on Monday by filing a complaint in the Berks County juvenile court.

"In short, [the son] was likely days away from a vastly different life. One that did not involve his return to Honduras — parts of which are so awful that the U.S. E mbassy in Honduras restricts employees from traveling there," Michael Edelman, another attorney for the mother and son, said late Wednesday. "After hearing that [they] were being deported, we rushed to federal court to see if we could protect the child. Unfortunately, we were unable to do so."

The 25-year-old woman and her son had been held in a family detention center in Berks County, P ennsylvania , after being detained at the s outhern border, according to one of her lawyers. She was part of a group of several dozen Central American families who sued DHS to secure their release from detention. Eventually , they appealed to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear their case last month. After the high court refused the case, the detainees — some in custody for more than 600 days — had little legal recourse to fight their deportation.

“These individuals started going through the process a year - and - a - half before this president took office,” an administration official told POLITICO. “If the courts repeatedly, one after the other, said ‘no,' we can’t justify keeping you in the country.”

The official said it would be “kind of weird” for the White House to intervene in this type of situation.

Casey has been advocating on behalf of the families for years, but especially this week, as possible deportations became more likely. On Tuesday, t he senator sent a letter to Kelly that called for the release of four other mothers and children in the facility, saying they had “fled unspeakable violence in their home countries.”

According to the senator, the mother witnessed the murder of a cousin in Honduras and faced threats from gangs. Casey said the family could be eligible for relief from deportation and that a return to Honduras could “very likely lead to their death.”

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“The gangs will target this mother and her child the moment they land in Honduras, yet Trump admin insists on this cruel policy,” he tweeted.

The "worst part," Casey tweeted, was that "according to lawyers @DHSgov knew darn well that 5yr old & mother had secured paperwork to protect them & they rushed removal." Casey then added: "Yup, that's right @DHSgov likely knew paperwork was in hand & rushed removal just because they could." And finally: "Why? Because that's the tone @realDonaldTrump has set- one in which pushing out a 5yr old and his mother is somehow a good idea."

Bridget Cambria, another lawyer on the case, said ICE woke up the mother and son at 3 a.m. early Wednesday without warning and prepared them for removal. "She wasn’t even able to get fully dressed,” Cambria said, citing reports from other mothers in the facility.

Jacquelyn Kline, another member of the woman's legal team, said the family faced grave danger in their home country. She said the family of the woman’s ex-partner once tried to hire a hit man to murder her, and that a local gang leader tried to coerce her into becoming his girlfriend.

Casey said he had spoken with White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, who committed to investigate the case further. The senator sent a letter to Trump on Wednesday that included a photo of the young boy who had been deported. In the letter, Casey said the president had the power to return the child to safety.

“There is a place for this child to go eventually. The cruel irony here is that there are a lot of people in this country that have opened their arms to these kinds of families, and yet that opportunity is ripped away from them,” Casey said. “These instances, we usually see the best of America and the worst of America. And right now the worst of America is what the executive branch is doing."