The Children of Arizona - A court stops Trump's deportation plans to Honduras and Guatemala

At the Evo A. DeConcini Courthouse in Tucson, a massive concrete structure on Congress Street, a decision was made on Thursday that determines the fate of almost seventy children - and at the same time the question of how far the United States is willing to bend its own laws.

Federal Judge Rosemary Márquez issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting the Trump administration from immediately removing dozens of children from Guatemala and Honduras. In doing so she converted an existing emergency order into a preliminary injunction. The message is clear: children who came to the US alone may not be put on planes in the dead of night and deported without being granted the right to be heard and legal counsel. The lawsuit bears the case number CV-25-00387-TUC-RM. It was filed by the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project - an organization that has supported unaccompanied minors for decades, for which we ourselves are also active. In this case acting on behalf of 57 Guatemalan and 12 Honduran children. The youngest are three years old, the oldest seventeen. Some have parents in the US ready to take them in, others are completely on their own. What they have in common: they fled countries where violence, poverty and hopelessness determine their lives - and after crossing the border found themselves in US shelters and foster families.

They were able to dismantle their sick march to the plane - and in doing so the perfidious dreams of a fascist president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, were thwarted.

The government argued it wanted to pursue "family reunification," returning children to their parents in Guatemala or Honduras. Our research however showed the opposite - and made it unmistakably clear that a return would plunge the children into acute danger to their lives. When Judge Márquez pressed the lawyers to name a single concrete case in which there had been an arrangement between parents, US authorities and the governments in Central America, the courtroom remained silent. "Not a single verifiable case," she later wrote in her reasoning. With that the central justification of the government collapsed.

What Márquez had before her was not just a legal file but the memory of a political pattern: operations in secret, quick transfers, hardly any communication with lawyers, let alone with the affected families. Already on August 31 dozens of children in Texas had boarded planes that were supposed to take them back to Guatemala. Only at the last minute did temporary restraining orders stop the departure. Now the government wanted to remove Honduran children abroad according to the same pattern. The Florence Project reacted immediately, expanded the lawsuit and included the twelve Hondurans in the proceedings. "It is truly astounding that the government is going down this road again after already trying to remove Guatemalan children abroad in the middle of the night," said Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, deputy director of the organization. "The difference between the protected children from Guatemala and the threatened children from Honduras is solely their country of origin - but the law protects them equally."

For the children the ruling means a respite - nothing more, but nothing less either. They may stay until the main proceedings are decided. They may present their stories to a court, with the support of lawyers, in facilities that are not run like prisons. In a political landscape where severity and deterrence have become the hallmark, this is a rare step toward hope. But the danger remains. The White House has already announced it wants to appeal the decision. Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson declared the government was "committed to reuniting families and protecting children" and accused the judge of unlawfully interfering. That these "protective measures" in fact consisted of nighttime deportation flights was not mentioned.

The story of the children from Honduras and Guatemala is therefore not yet written to the end. But for a moment, on a late summer day in Arizona, law triumphed over political arbitrariness. The image that remains is that of a judge reminding the machinery of power that laws also apply in the shadowland of migration. And it is the image of children who were not degraded to freight on the tarmac but remain human beings - with voices, stories and rights. That is worth fighting for, mostly hidden from the eyes of the world.