Marco Rubio denies Trump is deporting citizen kids

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has rejected the notion that the US government is deporting its own citizens, even as children as young as two years old have been sent out of the country. The administration is instead deporting their mothers, who choose to take their children with them, Rubio argued on Sunday.

- Gustaf Kilander, The Independent

Rubio appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, defending the Trump administration's immigration enforcement efforts, which have included the removal of at least three US citizen children, aged two, four, and seven. They were sent out of the country with their mothers. “Their mothers, who were illegally in this country, were deported. The children went with their mothers,” Rubio said.

“If those children are US citizens, they can come back into the United States if... their father or someone here... wants to assume them,” he added. “But, ultimately, who was deported was their mother, their mothers who were here illegally. The children just went with their mothers.”

The secretary slammed the allegations as “misleading,” arguing that press coverage of their removals “sound like ICE agents kicked down the door and grabbed the two-year-old and threw him on an airplane.” “That's just not true,” he said. Deported mothers weren't given the chance to contact their attorneys during their time in custody in the US, lawyers said. While Rubio defended the Trump administration's efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, he also said that all people in the US, citizens and noncitizens alike, are “of course” entitled to due process.