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A Texas family deported to Mexico while seeking emergency medical care for their daughter – a U.S. citizen – has appealed to return to the U.S.
The parents were driving their 10-year-old, who was recovering from brain surgery, to a Houston children’s hospital in February when U.S. Customs and Border Protection detained them.
They were deported to Mexico, taking four of their five U.S.-citizen children with them. They say their daughter, who had a brain tumor removed, and her older brother who has a heart condition, cannot receive adequate care in their rural home in Mexico, according to the family’s lawyers.
On Wednesday, the family’s attorneys asked the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General to grant them humanitarian parole to return to the United States during their daughter’s medical treatment.
The family also alleges they were subjected to abusive treatment during their detention and removal, and their lawyers have asked the DHS watchdog to investigate. The parents say their children were subjected to verbal abuse and were denied medical care while detained.
The deportation of undocumented parents with U.S. citizen children shows how far the Trump administration is willing to go to enforce immigration law, advocates say. The parents allegedly have a record of illegal crossings, and Trump administration officials are prioritizing for deportation anyone who came to the country without permission.
Federal officials denied the alleged abuses and said the parents had a record of crossing the border illegally, violations which led to their removal.
“As per standard procedure, the parents were given the choice to stay together and take their children to Mexico or leave them with a legal guardian in the U.S.,” Hilton Beckham, CBP assistant commissioner, said in a statement to USA TODAY. “They chose to stay together and depart to Mexico.”
The administration promised “they were going to target immigrants with criminal backgrounds,” said Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, whose pro bono lawyers are representing the family.
“Instead, they’re targeting a 10-year-old U.S. citizen girl with a brain tumor, and they’re prioritizing removing her parent,” Garza told USA TODAY.
Garza said the parents don’t have a criminal background. She declined to comment on the alleged illegal border crossings. USA TODAY is not using the family’s names due to safety issues in their region in Mexico.
In mid-March, the family’s attorneys initially filed a request for humanitarian parole with the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, but there were reportedly no staff to handle the petition amid sweeping cuts. Attorneys said they received no response.
CBP: Family ‘chose to stay together and depart’
The family’s attorneys say they faced an impossible choice: stay in the U.S. illegally and get their daughter the medical care she needed, or leave and risk their child’s life.
Beckham, the CBP assistant commissioner, said the parents were previously caught using fake birth certificates to enter the U.S. in September 2006 and were removed. They were apprehended again in June 2022. In February, they were stopped at a CBP checkpoint and were detained.
CBP maintains checkpoints within 100 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, including where the family lived in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
During their daughter’s treatment in Houston, the parents traveled through the checkpoint carrying a letter from Texas Children’s Hospital explaining their daughter’s condition; as well as evidence of their application for a visa and their children’s U.S. birth certificates.
They passed through the checkpoint near Sarita, Texas, multiple times without incident, Garza said.
In February, however, CBP officers detained the entire family at the checkpoint for six hours, the complaint said. Their church pastor, called to pick up their car, told officers about the daughter’s medical condition, according to the complaint.
The family is now staying with relatives in a rural part of Mexico, where there is frequent cartel violence and kidnappings, Garza said.
They are trying to arrange for their children to attend school in Mexico after not being enrolled for two months. Their sixth and eldest child, a 17-year-old boy, is being cared for by members of their Rio Grande Valley church, Garza said.
Since their daughter’s brain surgery, she has struggled to find words, has needed a leg brace and has been partially paralyzed on her right side, according to the family’s petition.
She requires regular daily medication to prevent seizures. According to the petition, the hospital letter the family carried requested the child be allowed to travel to Houston “to continue to be followed closely by the treatment team at Texas Children’s Hospital.”