Lawsuit alleging ICE deported US citizen dropped after central claim falls apart

An advocacy group for illegal immigrants dropped a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Thursday after claiming officials planned to deport a 2-year-old U.S. citizen.

The left-leaning National Immigration Project alleged in its April 24 lawsuit that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had detained a mother named Jenny Carolina Lopez-Villela, her 11-year-old daughter and her 2-year-old, who is a U.S. citizen. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Lopez-Villela entered the country illegally three times before she signed a letter agreeing to take her U.S.-born daughter with her to Honduras.

Lopez-Villela and the eleven-year-old already had deportation orders against them, the National Immigration Project’s lawsuit said. The orders for removal came in 2020 after the first illegal entry by Lopez-Villela and her older daughter, according to a Saturday DHS press release. The other two illegal entries happened under the Biden administration.

🧵The narrative that DHS is deporting American children is FALSE and irresponsible reporting.

The claim that U.S. citizen children are being deported is FALSE. pic.twitter.com/rqAPKnEAWR

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) May 10, 2025

The government showed the court a copy of Lopez-Villela’s letter about the 2-year-old American citizen, translated as, “I, Jenny Carolina Lopez [Villela], will bring my daughter, Valentina Mendez Lopez, with me to Honduras.”

The Trump administration said two other individuals in the U.S. had asked to be legal custodians of the 2-year-old but had not proven their identity. “Taking [her] away from her mother and placing her in the custody of individuals who are seemingly unprepared to establish their identities would pose a greater risk of harm,” the government said in a filing.

The DHS press release named the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as the plaintiff in the “baseless lawsuit,” despite court records only showing the National Immigration Project. The DHS and ACLU did not immediately respond to inquiries from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

National Immigration Project is part of the National Lawyers Guild, an advocacy group that often represents alleged leftist rioters in court. National Immigration Project did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The group said in an April 30 press release that ICE is deporting parents who are taking their children with them “under duress,” and therefore, “there was no meaningful decision to be made.” The ACLU has also repeated claims of ICE deporting “U.S. citizen children.”

The DHS said in a Saturday X post, however, that “the narrative that DHS is deporting American children is false and irresponsible reporting,” referring to media headlines about the issue.

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