NBC l Saturday, May 17, 2025 
Why U.S. citizen children sent with their deported moms can’t come back easily

Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Denisse Parra Vargas’ three children — two of them American citizens and one born in Mexico — in Texas last week and, because authorities deported their mother, sent them out of the United States too. The administration has responded to blowback from the children’s expulsions and those of other U.S. citizen minors, including a child with cancer and one recovering from a rare brain tumor, by saying the mothers were in the U.S. illegally and chose to take their children with them. The families and their attorneys vehemently disagree that the mothers had a choice. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested in an interview April 27 on “Meet the Press” that the children’s situations are easily fixed. “If those children are U.S. citizens,” he said, “they can come back into the United States if there’s their father or someone here who wants to assume them.” While attorneys, advocates and researchers agree that U.S. citizens generally have the right to return, they said suggestions that the children can just easily come back to the U.S. gloss over the barriers and difficulties of what that would entail. There are many hurdles that families would need to overcome for their U.S. citizen children to be able to return, according to Mich P. González, co-founder of Sanctuary of the South…Read more