US Deports 10-Year-Old Girl Who Was Partway Through Brain Cancer Treatment

A 10-year-old girl is now unable to continue her brain cancer treatment after she was deported by US immigration authorities to Mexico, NBC News reports.

The girl, an American citizen, and her four siblings, were forced out of the country when the US Customs and Border Protection agency deported her undocumented parents. And according to the mother, the girl and her 15-year-old brother, who suffers from a potentially life-threatening heart rhythm disorder, haven't received the healthcare they need since being removed from the US.

"The authorities have my children's lives in their hands," she told NBC in tears.

Their harrowing situation underscores the harsh immigration policies ramped up under president Donald Trump, who backed his border czar's suggestion that mixed-status families — that is, those typically made up of parents with undocumented status and children who were born in the US and are in the country legally — should be "deported together," as opposed to separating them.

"What is happening to this family is an absolute tragedy and it is something that is not isolated to just them," Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, told NBC. "This is part of a pattern in practice that we've seen in the Trump administration."

According to the family's attorney, the parents were detained at an immigration checkpoint while trying to visit their daughter's specialist doctors in Houston for an emergency medical checkup — a trip they'd made at least five times before.

Normally, producing letters from their doctors and lawyers was enough for the officers at the checkpoint to let the family through. But on February 4 — shortly after Trump's inauguration — the parents were suddenly arrested when they couldn't show legal documentation, despite explaining their daughter's pressing medical situation.

"They weren't interested in hearing that," the mother told NBC.

The family was taken to a detention center after being arrested, the mother said, with the mom and daughters separated from the father and sons. That same day, they were shuttled across the border in the back of a van and dumped on the other side of a bridge at the border.

Trump has revived the practice of detaining families with children, which was halted during the Biden administration but carried out by Obama and Bush. He has also sought to end automatic birthright citizenship via an executive order which has been blocked by courts.

Deporting US citizens, like the family's children, is illegal. But when undocumented parents are confronted with either being separated from their kids — possibly permanently — or "voluntarily" having the kids leave the country with them, it's not much of a choice. The alternative, in most situations, is that the children would be thrust into the US foster care system.

The family's ten-year-old girl was diagnosed with brain cancer last year. Her tumor was surgically removed, but the swelling in her brain hasn't fully gone away, causing difficulties with her speech and mobility, the mother said. Before being deported, doctors were regularly monitoring her recovery while she attended rehab therapy and took medication for her convulsions.

Now, the family hopes that they can be released under humanitarian parole, a status which was recently granted to an undocumented California mother so she could care for her daughter with cancer, after she was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

"We are calling on the government," Garza told NBC, "to parole the family in, to correct the harm that they've made and to not do this to anyone else."

More on immigration: MAGA Figures Turn on Elon Musk for Not Hating Immigrants Enough

The post US Deports 10-Year-Old Girl Who Was Partway Through Brain Cancer Treatment appeared first on Futurism.