After a family in Texas was deported to Mexico — including a 10-year-old daughter with brain cancer who is a U.S. citizen — three Hispanic Democrats made the trip across the border on Friday to visit the family.
The lawmakers — Reps. Adriano Espaillat, Sylvia Garcia and Joaquin Castro — made the stop in the hopes of bringing attention to the issue of mixed-status families being deported from the United States.
The parents, who are undocumented, were deported with their 10-year-old daughter and her four siblings in February, after a routine stop at a border checkpoint on their way from Rio Grande City to Houston for an emergency checkup for the daughter, according to NBC News.
“She had a tumor extracted from her and needs continuous treatment, also a teenage boy who’s got a cardiovascular problem — a heart problem,” Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said in an interview with NOTUS. “This is a wake-up call to America that this is not just about the undocumented. This is about U.S. citizens as well. And in this case, it is egregious that it is children.”
For the safety of the family, the lawmakers did not disclose where the family is currently staying in Mexico.
“It’s a tragedy. We shouldn’t have to make these trips,” Castro told NOTUS. “The family is obviously devastated.”
Espaillat told NOTUS they are working with the family’s attorneys to put forward a parole motion in the U.S.
“We want to help do anything we can to save her life,” Espaillat said. “And also assist the lawyers in the parole efforts for her parents to be able to enter the U.S. again.”
Espaillat also noted the lawmakers met with the U.S. consulate and were trying to get the family “U.S. passports that they currently don’t have, as well as other matters that need to be addressed on a practical basis.”
NBC News reported that the other four children — ages 15, 13, 8 and 6 — were also in the car when the family was detained. Four of the five children were born in the United States.
“It’s a reckless disregard for human life in court without any compassion at all,” Garcia said. “They had gone to Houston for over two years without a problem, until this year under this administration. This has got to stop.”
Democratic lawmakers have been making trips in the last few weeks to countries where people in the U.S. have been deported, in an effort to bring attention to the Trump administration’s deportation policies.
Most recently, groups of lawmakers visited El Salvador to push for the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who lived in Maryland before he was deported to a terrorist prison in El Salvador last month.
Asked for comment, U.S. Customs & Border Protection told NOTUS that “CBP cannot comment on individual cases due to privacy concerns.”
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Daniella Diaz is a reporter at NOTUS.