The Judicial Learning Curve

Around 3:00 a.m. Eastern Time on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, a supervisor at the Compass Connections children’s shelter in Harlingen, Texas, woke a 17-year-old boy from his sleep. Without explaining why or where they were going, the supervisor told the boy to gather his things to leave. Soon, under cover of darkness, the boy was ushered alongside other children onto a bus headed for the airport.

The boy, identified only as “A.R.M.D.” in court filings, began to pray. Growing up in Guatemala, he had experienced what he described as “neglect and abandonment” at the hands of his father. His single mother was unable to shield him from the “violent conditions” and “drug dealers” who threatened his safety, he said in a recent court declaration.

That’s why, last year, A.R.M.D. fled his home country for the United States. Upon arrival, he was placed in the Harlingen shelter by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services that is responsible for the care and custody of unaccompanied minors. His immigration proceedings are ongoing, with a court hearing scheduled for early October.

But on the morning of Aug. 31, as the bus made its way to the airport, A.R.M.D. worried that he would be returned to Guatemala without the opportunity to make his case in court.

Sharing his anxiety were other Guatemalan children who, like A.R.M.D., had been roused from bed in the middle of the night at their respective foster homes or care facilities. At a children’s shelter in McAllen, Texas, one young girl “was so scared that she vomited and asked to speak with a clinician.” Another teenager, who said that her sister was murdered in Guatemala last year, worried that she, too, would be killed if she returned. Other potential deportees cited personal histories involving family violence, sexual abuse, or human trafficking as reasons why they were afraid to return to their home country.

In theory, the law is supposed to protect unaccompanied children from being summarily whisked out of the country by the government. Recognizing their uniquely vulnerable status, courts and Congress have, over the course of several decades, carved out special legal protections for unaccompanied children. Among the most notable is the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, signed into law by President George W. Bush, which establishes that any unaccompanied child not from Mexico or Canada must be placed in immigration court proceedings and provided access to counsel. These protections essentially exempt many unaccompanied children from speedy deportation—called “expedited removal”—and ensure that they have their day in court.

But none of that seemed to matter on Labor Day weekend. The Trump administration, in its frantic effort to deport immigrants en masse, gathered dozens of children and put them on airplanes for deportation. A.R.M.D. is one of ten named plaintiffs in a suit that unfolded over the holiday weekend as immigration attorneys sought to halt their summary expulsion.

The circumstances bear a striking similarity to that of an earlier case involving the frenzied removal of migrants without process and with scant legal basis. In that case, which played out in March before Judge James Boasberg, the planes took off from the United States and landed in El Salvador—and more than 250 men ended up in a notorious prison.

This time, too, the administration’s efforts to remove these children in secret and over a weekend prompted the speedy intervention of a district court judge. But Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who handled the case this time, had a big advantage over Judge Boasberg: She knew what had happened the last time.

And that, it turned out, made all the difference. At key moments, Sooknanan—her eye clearly on what happened before Judge Boasberg—made different decisions, put things in writing, and monitored compliance with her orders to make sure the children were not removed behind her back, or over her objections. The result is that a week later, the children are still in the United States—and there is an ongoing legal process before a different judge to decide their fate.

Weekend Emergency Removal Litigation: Vol. 1

Nearly six months ago, on March 15, it was Judge Boasberg who took the unusual step of holding a hearing on a Saturday evening.

The hearing had been set in motion one day prior, when President Donald J. Trump supposedly signed—but had not yet published—a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA). The rarely-used law, which dates to 1798, allows the president to detain and deport citizens of hostile governments. In this case, the proclamation claims to invoke the Act against an “invasion” by Tren de Aragua, a Venezuela criminal gang. According to the proclamation, that finding authorizes the Trump administration to summarily remove migrants it deems to be members of Tren de Aragua.

The proclamation would remain a secret until it was published the next day. In the meantime, however, the United States government was preparing to spirit away hundreds of Venezuelan men—not to Venezuela, but to El Salvador, which had agreed to imprison the men in the brutal prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.

As the government began to move migrants in preparation for their deportation flights, advocates caught wind of the plan. Around 1:00 a.m. on Saturday, March 15, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit on behalf of five Venezuelan men who were being held at an immigration facility near Harlingen, Texas. Each of the plaintiffs in the case, called J.G.G. v. Trump, had open immigration cases—and each adamantly denied being a member of Tren de Aragua. Shortly after filing suit, the ACLU lawyers sought a temporary restraining order to bar the removal of the five men under the Act.

Around 8:00 a.m. on Saturday, the case landed with Judge Boasberg, a former prosecutor who was first appointed by George W. Bush to D.C. Superior Court and, later, by Barack Obama to the federal district court. Upon learning that he’d been randomly assigned to the case, the judge promptly “reached out to locate government counsel,” according to an opinion he issued in April. In the meantime, the plaintiffs’ lawyers informed Boasberg that at least one of the named plaintiffs in the suit had already been boarded on a plane that could depart imminently. The judge, having not yet heard back from the government, issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the government from removing the five men named in the suit.

The named plaintiffs were subsequently removed from the planes, but that left an outstanding question: What would happen to the other migrants waiting on the tarmac? Earlier that morning, lawyers for the ACLU had filed a motion to provisionally certify a broader class of people who were subject to removal under the Act. Over the government’s objections, Boasberg set a 5:00 p.m. emergency hearing to hear argument on whether he should extend the protection of his temporary restraining order to the broader group.

The hearing began that evening, about an hour after Trump’s proclamation became public at 3:53 p.m. Drew Ensign, a former corporate lawyer turned Justice Department political appointee, appeared on behalf of the government. As he cited case after case in support of the government’s opposition to class certification, it was obvious that Ensign had come prepared with detailed legal arguments. Still, he insisted that he did not know any details about whether deportations were underway. At one point, Boasberg asked if any flights were scheduled to leave “in the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours.” Ensign replied: “I don’t know the answer to that question.”

A whistleblower report would later claim that this statement by Ensign was false. According to the whistleblower—a former Justice Department official named Erez Reuveni—Ensign had been present for a meeting the day before the March 15 hearing. According to Reuveni’s account of that meeting, Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove had told Ensign and others that planes containing migrants subject to the proclamation would take off over the weekend “no matter what.”

Unaware of that key detail, Boasberg took Ensign at his word. By that point, the plaintiffs had informed the judge that planes may have already taken off during the hearing. Even so, rather than extending the protections of his previous order, the judge temporarily adjourned the hearing so that Ensign could “do some digging” into the status of the flights. During the forty-minute break, two planes carrying migrants took off for Honduras en route to their final destination: El Salvaldor.

Ensign, for his part, claimed to be ignorant of the departures. When he returned to the hearing at 6:00 p.m., he said he still did not know the status of the flights. “I do not have additional details I can provide at this time,” he told the judge.

At about 6:45 p.m., Boasberg issued an oral order barring the government from removing any noncitizen solely on the basis of the Alien Enemies Act proclamation. He instructed Ensign that “any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States.” This is something that needs to be complied with “immediately,” Boasberg added.

The judge’s order was memorialized in writing on the court’s docket at 7:25 p.m. Minutes later—at 7:37 p.m. and 8:10 p.m., respectively—the two flights that had taken off during the hearing landed in Honduras, where they remained for several hours before departing for El Salvador. There, hours after Boasberg’s written order appeared on the docket, members of the putative class covered by that order were transferred into the custody of El Salvador.

On Sunday morning, March 16, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, began posting videos of the shackled migrants as they were hauled off planes and marched into prison cells at CECOT. In another post on X, Bukele linked to a New York Post headline about Boasberg’s order. “Oopsie…Too late,” he wrote. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, reposted Bukele’s tweet.

In the days and weeks that followed, the government stonewalled as the judge tried to get answers about the factual circumstances surrounding the government’s apparent non-compliance. In a series of increasingly antagonistic filings, the government essentially argued that it was not obligated to comply with Boasberg’s oral command to turn the planes around. Instead, the Justice Department claimed that it was only obligated to follow the written order, which it interpreted as prohibiting “removal” of the migrants from United States territory—as opposed to removal from United States custody. Because the planes had exited U.S. airspace before Boasberg had entered that written order, the government reasoned that it had not violated the order when it transferred the migrants to Salvadoran custody.

In April, as Boasberg weighed whether to initiate contempt proceedings related to the government’s non-compliance, the Supreme Court vacated the temporary restraining orders he had issued the month prior. By a 5-to-4 vote, the Court held that the plaintiffs in the case filed the wrong type of suit in the wrong venue. Announcing that challenges to removal under the Alien Enemies Act sound in habeas corpus, the court essentially found that the plaintiffs should have filed a habeas petition in Texas instead of the suit they brought in Washington, D.C.

The ruling raised the question of whether Boasberg would continue to pursue an inquiry into the government’s non-compliance with his orders—orders that, according to the Supreme Court, he did not have jurisdiction to issue in the first place. Little more than two weeks later, the judge gave his answer. In a scorching 46-page opinion, Boasberg found probable cause to hold the government in criminal contempt. The government could remedy the contempt, Boasberg said, by giving the men detained under the Alien Enemies Act an opportunity to challenge their detentions. If not, he would initiate proceedings to figure out who was responsible for the contempt. And, if the Justice Department ultimately declined to charge that person with a crime, Boasberg said that he’d appoint a prosecutor to do the job under Rule 42 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

Within days of issuing that order, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily paused the contempt proceedings while it considered whether to block the order entirely. Then, in early August, the appeals court delivered another blow to Boasberg’s efforts to hold the government accountable. By a 2-to-1 vote, the panel vacated Boasberg’s probable cause order. The majority judges, both of whom were appointed to the bench by President Trump, diverged in their reasoning. Judge Gregory Katsas found that Boasberg’s order could not support a criminal contempt conviction because his prohibition on “removing” alleged Tren de Aragua members was, at best, ambiguous. Judge Neomi Rao, on the other hand, reasoned that Boasberg inappropriately sought to compel compliance with his order by “pressuring” the government to assert custody over the Venezuelan men to remedy its violation.

Despite their diverging views, neither Judge Katsas nor Judge Rao spared much sympathy for their colleague on the district court—who had, by all appearances, been treated in a manner no self-respecting federal judge would tolerate, even if one accepted that it didn’t rise to criminal contempt. Rao wrote that Boasberg’s probable cause order “forces a coequal branch to choose between capitulating to an unlawful judicial order and subjecting its officials to a dubious prosecution.” Katsas similarly warned that the show-cause order “would provoke many grave conflicts between the Judicial Branch and the Executive Branch.” Neither judge acknowledged that this interbranch crisis had been precipitated not by Boasberg’s order, but by an executive branch bent on testing the limits of judicial authority.

The panel’s decision came just three weeks after 252 men whom the Trump administration had sent to El Salvador were set free. On July 18, the men were released to Venezuela as a part of a prisoner exchange orchestrated by the United States government. After their release, according to news reports and court filings, the men revealed that their time in CECOT had been marked by physical violence, inadequate nutrition, medical neglect, and, in some cases, sexual assault. The Washington Post reported that, at one point, the detainees tried to stage a hunger strike. When that failed, they used shards from metal pipes to cut into their skin so that they could write messages on their sheets in blood. One read: “We are not terrorists, we are migrants.”

Some of those men were on the planes that would never have reached El Salvador had the government complied with Judge Boasberg’s order. And though their eventual release marked the end of a horrific ordeal, it brought the public no closer to learning the truth of who should be held accountable for the government’s non-compliance—and how.

One thing the J.G.G. case did apparently do, however, was offer the other judges on the district bench in Washington an object lesson in how to handle—and how not to handle—government representations when it is organizing a secret mass deportation over a weekend that suddenly spills out into court. And it turns out, the judges were listening.

Weekend Emergency Removal Litigation: Vol. 2

Six months later, as A.R.M.D. and dozens of other children prepared to board buses bound for an airport in Texas, a different federal judge awoke to news of a lawsuit in Washington, D.C.

The judge, Sparkle Sooknanan, was a recent addition to the federal bench, having been appointed to the district court by Joe Biden in January of this year. Earlier in her career, Sooknanan worked as a corporate lawyer and, later, served as a Justice Department official during the Biden administration.

Over Labor Day weekend, Sooknanan was serving as the court’s emergency duty judge—that is, the district court judge on call to handle any emergency litigation that might arise outside of normal business hours. Around 2:00 a.m. that Sunday, Aug. 31, she was alerted to the emergency unfolding in a case called L.G.M.L et al. v. Noem.

​​In the days and weeks leading up to the emergency litigation, advocates for unaccompanied children had observed several unusual developments related to their clients’ immigration proceedings. In August, officers with Homeland Security Investigations—a criminal law enforcement division—began conducting interviews with children in the custody of ORR, supposedly for the purpose of facilitating “family reunification.” Later that month, during immigration hearings, some unaccompanied children were informed by immigration judges that their names appeared on a list of minors seeking voluntary return to Guatemala—despite never having made such a request.

By the end of August, immigration attorneys observed that several of their clients’ previously scheduled immigration hearings had been cancelled without explanation.

Late in the evening on Aug. 30, it became clear why. At 11:45 p.m. Eastern Time, ORR sent notices to care providers, informing them that children in their program had been identified for “reunification” to Guatemala and instructing them to prepare the children for discharge within two hours.

In an effort to stop the deportations, lawyers with the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) filed suit on behalf of ten unaccompanied Guatemalan children around 1:00 a.m. on Aug. 31. The complaint alleges that the government’s planned removals violate specific statutory and constitutional protections to which unaccompanied children are entitled, including those established in the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA). 

Shortly after filing the complaint, the NILC lawyers sought a temporary restraining order to halt the deportations of the 10 plaintiffs named in the suit. An unusual addition to the motion’s caption underscored the sense of urgency: “FLIGHTS DEPARTING THE UNITED STATES IN THE NEXT FOUR HOURS.”

As Judge Boasberg did back in March, Judge Sooknanan sprang into action. She promptly reached out to counsel for the government, seeking to ascertain more information. At 3:18 a.m. Eastern Time, she left a voicemail on the phone of Brian Hudak, the chief of the Civil Division at the Justice Department. The judge also left a message with Jonathan Hornock, the head of the Criminal Division, telling him that the case had been filed and that she wanted to hear from the government, if possible.

As Sooknanan waited for word from the government, lawyers for the Guatemalan children notified her that they, too, had been unable to reach anyone at the Justice Department. They added that shelters in South Texas had been notified by the ORR to prepare Guatemalan children for discharge. “Upon information and belief, ICE agents and their contractors have started attempting to pick up Guatemalan unaccompanied children from shelters in South Texas to transport them to the airport for potential removal from the United States,” the attorneys wrote.

At 4:22 a.m., having yet to receive a response from the government, the judge entered a temporary restraining order barring the removal of the children named in the suit “to maintain the status quo until a hearing can be set.”

Like Boasberg in J.G.G., Judge Sooknanan initially stopped short of extending the protection of her order to a broader group beyond the ten named plaintiffs. But the potential class was large—the L.G.M.L. attorneys estimated that more than 100 children were already boarding flights for removal, and hundreds more were potentially at risk of being summarily deported. Sooknanan set a 3:00 p.m. hearing to hear arguments on both the temporary restraining order and the class certification questions.

Later that morning, however, the judge received another call on the court’s emergency line. It was the plaintiffs’ attorneys, who reported that some of the children in the proposed class were already being transferred to planes for removal.

And this is where, with her eye likely on how the government had abused Judge Boasberg’s imprecisions, Judge Sooknanan started handling things differently. In light of that information, she moved the 3:00 p.m. hearing up to 12:30 p.m.

More than 1,400 miles southwest of the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse, A.R.M.D. arrived by bus to the Sun Valley Airport. By then, the judge’s 4:22 a.m. order barring his removal had been in place for hours. But the teenager’s statement suggests he didn’t know that as he stepped off the bus around 11 a.m. Eastern Time and exchanged goodbyes with the friends he’d made at the shelter. Standing in view of the tarmac, he watched as other children boarded the planes, wondering if he’d be called next.

Meanwhile, one of his attorneys, Lauren Flores, had also made her way to the airport. Flores is the legal director at ProBAR, a pro bono immigration services provider whose clients include unaccompanied children at 22 shelters across South Texas. Around 12:30 a.m. Eastern Time the night before, while many of ProBAR’s attorneys were asleep, the organization learned that shelter programs had been told to prepare children to be repatriated. The next morning, Flores awoke to a “flurry” of urgent messages informing her that some of ProBAR’s clients had been removed from ORR custody—and were already being boarded onto an ICE-contracted transport plane.

Armed with Judge Sooknanan’s restraining order, Flores arrived at the airport to search for A.R.M.D. and others. On the tarmac, she saw two ICE transport planes, their doors sealed shut. Nearby, she spotted a building and knocked on the door. Through the glass, she could see officers seated inside. Eventually, a young man answered the door. Flores explained that she had clients on one of the planes and a court order to stop it from leaving.

While the young man disappeared inside the building to find his supervisor, Flores waited next to the door. She told anyone who entered or exited the building that they “were all complicit in violating a federal court order” if the plane left with her clients aboard.

Eventually, when the young man returned, he told Flores that his supervisor was trying to contact ICE. But as Flores again tried to explain that she had a court order, another official stepped outside and “physically pulled the young man back into the building.” Through the glass, she saw staff members “jeering and laughing.” She repeated her earlier warning: If the plane carrying her clients took off, they were “all complicit in the violation of the judge’s order.”

What Flores didn’t know was that A.R.M.D. had never been boarded onto a plane. According to a declaration filed in L.G.M.L., he was ultimately told that he wasn’t “on the list” of minors being returned. For hours, as he waited to return to the shelter, he watched the planes on the tarmac and worried that they’d made a mistake. Around 12:00 or 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time—either just before or during Judge Sooknanan’s hearing in D.C.—he says he saw one of the planes take off. Not long after that, the same plane returned, with the children still aboard.

As this scene played out in Texas, counsel on both sides in the L.G.M.L. case logged onto Zoom for the 12:30 p.m. hearing before Judge Sooknanan. Efren Olivares, an experienced immigration attorney with the NILC, appeared on behalf of the Guatemalan children. Representing the Justice Department was none other than Ensign—the same attorney who’d been accused of misleading Boasberg in J.G.G.

Judge Sooknanan was running late, and the reason for her tardiness soon became apparent: At 12:37 p.m., the judge issued a new written order. The order prohibited the government from removing any “Guatemalan unaccompanied minors” who were in ORR custody as of 1:02 a.m. on Aug. 31, 2025. The judge, in other words, had agreed to extend her restraining order to a broader group of plaintiffs.

The hearing began minutes after Judge Sooknanan issued the new order. Skipping the usual pleasantries, she cut to the chase: “Mr. Ensign, can I ask you, are you aware that I just issued an order on the docket with respect to the putative class?”

“I’m not,” Ensign replied.

Noting that she had already emailed the new order to the chief of the Civil Division at the Justice Department, Judge Sooknanan told Ensign that she wanted to adjourn the hearing so that he could circulate the order himself. “I want to make sure that you take five minutes right now and circulate that order to everyone who needs to see it,” she said.

When Ensign returned from recess, he informed the judge that all of the planes had been grounded. One of them might have taken off, he said, but his understanding was that the plane had returned. (The government, in a recent filing, now denies that any planes ever took off.)

This appears to reflect another lesson Sooknanan  may have learned from Boasberg’s experience: She made sure the planes were still on the ground in the United States. There would be no question of whether the children were beyond the reach of her orders because they had left U.S. airspace already. There would be no question of whether the client agency understood that orders had been issued or what their contours were.

Turning to the legal arguments, Ensign detailed, for the first time, the government’s purported legal basis for summarily removing the children. He contended that the administration’s authority to do so derives from a subsection of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which assigns ORR responsibility for the care and custody of unaccompanied minors. Among other duties, the Act provides that ORR is responsible for “reuniting unaccompanied alien children with a parent abroad in appropriate cases.” According to Ensign, this “reunification” provision allows ORR to repatriate unaccompanied children without regard to the statutory protections set out in the TVPRA, which entitles such children to full immigration court proceedings and access to counsel.

“The Government of Guatemala has requested the return of these children, and all of these children have their parents or guardians in Guatemala who are requesting their return,” Ensign told the judge. “We certainly dispute that these are removals,” he continued, referring to the statutory language used in immigration statutes, including the TVPRA. “This is reuniting children with their parents and guardians.”

Judge Sooknanan, for her part, was “alarmed” at Ensign’s argument—and for good reason. In the normal course of immigration proceedings, if a child wants to be reunited with a parent abroad, the child’s attorney can request voluntary departure from an immigration court. Once the petition is granted, ORR plays a limited role in facilitating the child’s safe repatriation. But under the government’s broad interpretation of the law, a little-known subsection of the Homeland Security Act would authorize ORR to establish its own repatriation program, bypassing the normal immigration process and sidestepping laws that Congress specifically enacted to protect a particularly vulnerable population.

Judge Sooknanan was also skeptical of the factual basis for Ensign’s claims. He had asserted that every child’s parent had requested their return to Guatemala. But counsel for the plaintiffs disputed that, pointing to declarations they had filed on behalf of the children. With Ensign’s alleged misrepresentations so recently the subject of public controversy, the judge took care to establish a clear factual record on this point.

“Mr. Ensign, are you representing that all of these children are being moved because their parents have requested that they return to Guatemala?” she asked.

“Your honor, that’s my understanding,” he replied. “That’s what I’ve been told, that these requests have been relayed through the government of Guatemala.” He added that any disputed questions of fact to that end could be “resolved through briefing.”

At this point, Judge Sooknanan had heard enough. She announced that she planned to keep her temporary restraining orders in place at least until the parties briefed the matter.

Sooknanan then directed her attention to Olivares, the plaintiffs’ attorney. “Mr. Olivares, do you believe you have what you need in terms of an order from this court to prevent these children from being removed until we sort out which narrative here is correct?” she asked. “I do not want there to be any ambiguity about what I am ordering or what the government is to do down the road.”

“There have been multiple instances where, you know, ex post allegations of confusion and misunderstanding have resulted in irreparable harm,” Olivares replied. “Frankly, part of me would like to stay in this hearing until the kids have deplaned, if that were possible.”

Taking this cue, Judge Sooknanan instructed Ensign to go find out if his clients planned to deplane the children and return them to ORR custody. Ensign scurried off to call his clients and, upon his return, he confirmed that the government did, indeed, intend to deplane and return the children pursuant to the court’s order.

Sooknanan, for her part, told Ensign that she’d had a chance to read from some of the plaintiffs’ declarations while he was gone. “I just want to read from some of the declarations, because I have these conflicting stories about whether this is an attempt to reunite children with their parents,” she said.

For the next several minutes, the judge read aloud from passages in various declarations submitted with the plaintiffs’ motion for a temporary restraining order. In one, a minor describes how her parents in Guatemala unexpectedly received a “strange phone call” in which someone told them that the United States government planned to deport their child as a part of a larger group of Guatemalans. In others, the children say that they came to the United States after experiencing abuse, neglect, and family violence.

“Every one of these ten declarants who are named plaintiffs speak about being afraid of going back to Guatemala,” the judge observed. “This doesn’t quite line up with what I’m hearing from the government…This is why we have process, this is why we have courts.”

Judge Sooknanan then acknowledged that it is “extraordinary” to enter a temporary restraining order, especially without first hearing from both sides of the case. But, she continued, the government chose the “wee hours of the morning on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend” to execute a plan to move the children. “Absent action and intervention by the court, all of those children would have been returned to Guatemala, potentially to extremely dangerous situations,” she said.

“I’m going to put it on the record again, just so there’s absolutely no ambiguity about where we are,” the judge continued before concluding the hearing. “These children are going to be deplaned. They're going to be returned to ORR custody. And no attempts will be made to remove them from ORR custody and remove them to Guatemala, in light of my order, while these preliminary emergency proceedings are pending,” she said.

Her expectations were absolutely clear. There was no exploitable gap between what she said orally and what she said in writing.

And over the remainder of Labor Day weekend, Sooknanan closely monitored the government’s efforts to return the children to their respective care facilities. In total, she ordered the government to submit five status reports detailing its progress. By noon on Monday, the government reported that all 76 of the children at the airport had been returned to ORR custody.

Among them was A.R.M.D., whose bus departed the airport around 7:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, Aug. 31, more than 16 hours after he’d been pulled out of bed at the Harlingen shelter the night before. But instead of returning to his previous shelter, he was dropped off at a new facility some 30 minutes down the road. “Since this happened, I feel like the days are really long,” A.R.M.D. wrote in a recent court filing. “I can’t focus on anything because I just keep thinking about them trying to return me to Guatemala.”

Judge Sooknanan’s temporary restraining order remains in place while the parties litigate the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction and class certification, which, if granted, would provide longer-term relief to the proposed class. But the resolution of that motion won’t be decided by Judge Sooknanan, whose involvement with the case ended with her tenure as the emergency duty judge after the holiday weekend.

The matter is now assigned to Judge Tim Kelly, a Trump appointee. A preliminary injunction hearing is scheduled for Sept. 10, 2025 at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. We’ll soon find out if he, too, has been paying attention.