BigCommerce PHP API delete Category which contains products

Question

When inside of bigcommerce category manager, if I attempt to delete a category that contains products, I am prompted to relocate all affected products.

I am using PHP and standard auth to communicate with the bigcommerce api. I have a script that will delete a category from bigcommerce when that category is empty, but it fails with no status codes or errors, if that category contains products.

Is there supposed to be any return/response/status code for this occurrence?

here is my delete code:

Bigcommerce_Api::failOnError();
 try {
    $delCategory = BigCommerce_Api::deleteCategory($curCatid);
 } catch(Bigcommerce_Api_Error $error) {
    $e1=$error->getCode(); 
    $e2=$error->getMessage();
    echo $e1.'<br>';
    echo $e2.'<br>';
 }

Thanks in advance for any useful assistance.