Blue state

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

September 2, 2025

In the early hours of Sunday morning, in the middle of a three-day holiday weekend, the Trump administration attempted to take children out of government custody and ship them alone to their country of origin, Guatemala.

On Friday, Priscilla Alvarez of CNN broke the story that the administration was planning to move up to 600 children from the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where they are held according to law until they can be released to a relative or a guardian living in the U.S. who can take care of them while their case for asylum in the U.S. is being processed.

ORR is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Its mission, according to its website, is to promote the health, well-being, and stability of refugees, unaccompanied alien children, and other eligible individuals and families, through culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and strengths-based services. Our vision is for all new arrivals to be welcomed with equitable, high-quality services and resources so they can maximize their potential.”

Alvarez notes that unaccompanied migrant children are considered a vulnerable population and are covered by the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. That law gives them enhanced protections and care, making sure they are screened to see if they have been trafficked or are afraid of persecution in the country they come from. Congress has specified that such children can be removed from the country only under special circumstances.

Nonetheless, the administration appears to have removed about 76 of these children from the custody of ORR—the only agency with legal authority to hold them—where they were waiting to be released to a relative or guardian, and transferred them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Once they were in ICE custody, the administration planned “to put them on flights to Guatemala, where they may face abuse, neglect, persecution, or even torture,” according to a U.S. court.

At about 1:00 in the morning, Eastern Time, on Sunday, August 31, advocates for the children filed a suit to prevent the administration from removing them. Shortly after 2:30 in the morning, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan got a phone call about the case, and by 4:00 she had issued an emergency order blocking the removal and scheduled a hearing for 3:00 that afternoon. She moved it up to 12:30 when she learned that the administration was already moving some children out of the country.

Legal analyst Anna Bower was on the call for the hearing and reported that Sooknanan said: “I got a call at 2:36 am because the government chose the wee hours of the morning on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend to execute a plan to move these children. That’s why we’re here. And I tried to reach the government. I have been up since then…and didn’t reach anyone from the government until later this morning. And the imminence that the plaintiff claimed proved true, because, in fact, those planes *were* loaded. One actually took off and was returned. And so, absent action and intervention by the court, all of those children would have been returned to Guatemala, potentially to extremely dangerous situations.”

Some of the children were actually in a plane to be removed while the hearing was underway. Sooknanan required the government to report to her when each child was back in ORR custody. By noon Monday, according to the government’s lawyers, all the children were back in ORR custody.

The rush to deport children in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, in apparent violation of the law, looked a great deal like the administration’s removal of undocumented immigrants from Venezuela to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador in March. At the time, President Donald J. Trump denied that he had signed the order invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act the administration used to justify the rendition of the men to El Salvador. “Other people handled it,” he said, even though his signature is on the document that appears in the Federal Register.

Trump’s apparent distance from that earlier removal comes to mind now because the other big story over Labor Day weekend was Trump’s relative disappearance from public view since last Tuesday. As Garrett Graff of Doomsday Scenario recorded, Trump, who normally talks to the press as often as possible, had no public appearances on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. Coming on top of Vice President J.D. Vance’s odd comment in an interview with USA Today last week that he was ready to be president if needed—“I’ve gotten a lot of good on-the-job training over the past 200 days,” he said—rumors flew. Over the weekend, “Is Trump dead?” was one of Google’s top searches.

Although he posted “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE” on social media on Sunday, Trump continued to keep a long distance between himself and the press.

Trump appeared today in the Oval Office—an hour late—to announce he would move Space Force headquarters from Colorado to Alabama, apparently to put the rumors of his ill health to rest.

At the event, Trump referred to the recent court decision declaring many of his tariffs illegal, saying that “if you took away tariffs, we could end up being a third-world country.” In fact, the country’s economy has slowed significantly since Trump instituted his tariffs, and Trump’s agenda continues to take hits.

Yesterday, nine former directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents reaching back to President Jimmy Carter, published an op-ed in the New York Times warning that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “is endangering every American’s health.”

William Foege, William Roper, David Satcher, Jeffrey Koplan, Richard Besser, Tom Frieden, Anne Schuchat, Rochelle P. Walensky, and Mandy K. Cohen listed their concerns about Kennedy’s policies. He “has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more,” they wrote.

“Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage.”

Kennedy’s firing of CDC director Dr. Susan Monarez last Wednesday, a firing Trump approved, appears to have been the event that spurred the former directors to speak up as a group. They wrote that what Kennedy has done to the CDC and to public health in the U.S. since taking office is “unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.”

The former CDC directors warned that the health of every American is at risk. They urged Congress to exercise its authority over the Department of Health and Human Services, state and local governments and private philanthropy to cover the funding Kennedy has killed, and physicians to support their patients, and they called upon all Americans to “look out for one another.”

A post on Trump’s social media account yesterday morning seemed to try to blame “Drug Companies” for “let[ting] everyone rip themselves apart, including Bobby Kennedy Jr. and CDC,” suggesting that administration officials are aware that there is a political backlash brewing over the administration’s assault on public health.

The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, says the administration is deliberately “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Today, more than 85 scientists released a joint review of the U.S. Department of Energy’s new climate report, saying it was “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking.”

Trump’s attempt to defend Russian president Vladimir Putin took another hit yesterday when Russia appeared to jam the GPS of an airplane carrying European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to Bulgaria. The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union, which has stood firm against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and continues to support Ukraine. Russia appears to have been jamming plane GPS in the airspace around the Baltic coast since it invaded Ukraine again in 2022 but denies it is doing so.

A source told the Financial Times that the pilots of the plane carrying von der Leyen had to land using paper maps.

Today, Judge Charles Breyer of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegesth, and the Department of Defense acted illegally when they used the Marines and the National Guard in Los Angeles, California. (As legal analyst Bower noted, whether their deployment of the military is legal is a separate case now pending before the Ninth Circuit.)

Judge Breyer noted that Congress had spoken clearly when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law. “Nevertheless,” the judge wrote, “at Defendants’ orders and contrary to Congress’s explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws.” Evidence at trial showed that armed soldiers set up protective perimeters and traffic blockages, engaged in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrated a military presence in and around Los Angeles. “In short,” he concluded, the “Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.”

Breyer noted that 300 troops still remain in Los Angeles, and he warned that Trump and Hegseth have “stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country…thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.” The judge prohibited the defendants “from deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops heretofore deployed in California, to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants.” Breyer stayed the order until noon on September 12 to give the administration time to appeal.

Yesterday, Americans turned out across the country to protest Trump and the administration, and popular anger at government overreach may be showing in the legal system as well. Six times now, federal grand juries have declined to indict defendants picked up in connection with Trump’s deployment of troops in Washington, D.C. Although right-wing media is slamming Judge James Boasberg today for releasing Nathalie Rose Jones after she made threats against Trump, a grand jury refused to indict her.

More famously, a grand jury last week refused to indict Sean Dunn, the former Justice Department paralegal who threw a submarine sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer. The government charged Dunn with felony assault, for which he would have faced up to eight years in prison if convicted. Although officers tackled Dunn at the scene, the government later posted a dramatic video of heavily armed law enforcement officers going to Dunn’s apartment to arrest him.

As Liz Oyer, a former pardon attorney for the Department of Justice, said: “What’s so extraordinary about this is it shows that we the citizens are the last line of defense for our democracy…and we the citizens are standing strong.”