A 6-year-old boy with leukemia could not make it to his doctor’s appointment because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested him, his 9-year-old sister and mother a week earlier in Los Angeles immigration court, according to a lawsuit over the family’s ongoing detention.
Now they have spent nearly a month detained at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, an ICE facility about a 70-mile drive southwest from San Antonio, Texas, where the child’s mother fears for her son’s health and has watched him deteriorate, the lawsuit says.
“We do not believe he is getting proper care,” attorneys with the Texas Civil Rights Project, which is representing the family, told McClatchy News on June 26.
“This facility has a long and well documented history of providing poor medical care,” they said in an emailed statement.
In a petition for writ of habeas corpus and complaint filed in federal court June 24, the attorneys argue the family has been illegally detained in violation of their rights to due process because they are asylum seekers, and that they are at risk of being wrongly deported to Honduras, the country they fled from.
The case, first reported by Texas Public Radio, was filed against Dilley Immigrant Processing Center Warden Jose Rodriguez, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, ICE, the U.S. Department of Justice and its Executive Office for Immigration Review, as well as leaders of the federal agencies.
In an emailed statement to McClatchy News on June 26, Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said that “at no time during detention is a detained individual denied emergency care.”
“This family had chosen to appeal their case — which had already been thrown out by an immigration judge — and will remain in ICE custody until it is resolved,” McLaughlin said, adding that the child has been seen by a medical professional at the facility regularly.
“The implication that ICE would deny a child the medical care they need is flatly false, and it is an insult to the men and women of federal law enforcement. ICE always prioritizes the health, safety, and well-being of all detainees in its care,” McLaughlin also said.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review declined McClatchy News’ request for comment June 26.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lacy McAndrew, of the Western District of Texas, and Mary F. Kruger, the district’s civil chief, represent Rodriguez. They did not return a request for comment.
Family seeks asylum in US
The complaint says the U.S. government allowed the boy, his sister and mother, who was born in 1996, into the U.S. Oct. 26 as asylum seekers, after they faced death threats in Honduras and sought safety.
On May 29, they appeared in Los Angeles immigration court for a routine hearing related to their asylum request, according to the complaint.
That is when a judge abruptly dismissed their case, despite the mother’s objections, because the judge sided with a DHS lawyer who motioned for the dismissal during the hearing, the complaint says.
Afterward, the mother and her children were walking out of the courtroom when, “without any prior notice or warning,” ICE agents dressed in civilian clothes “arrested the family in the hallway before the family could enter the elevator,” the filing says.
They were put in a room inside the courthouse, where they were held for hours as the children cried, according to the complaint. The complaint says they were then taken to an immigration center in the city.
At the Los Angeles facility, the 6-year-old boy became “terrified” when he saw a federal agent’s gun and “urinated on himself,” the complaint says.
“No one offered (him) dry clothing for hours and he remained in wet, urine-stained clothing,” the family’s attorneys wrote in the filing.
They were put on a plane by federal agents the next day, May 30, and flown to San Antonio before they were taken to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, located in Frio County, the complaint says.
The family’s detention
The mother and her children are in the facility together, but their detention is taking a heavy toll on them, according to attorneys with the Texas Civil Rights Project.
The woman is “trapped in a prison and forced to watch her son’s symptoms get worse, but is helpless to do anything about it,” the attorneys told McClatchy News.
She has been having high blood pressure, which she had not experienced before being detained, according to the complaint.
Her daughter “is barely eating,” the filing says, and her son “has generally lost his appetite, has experienced easy bruising and occasional bone pain, and looks pale – all of which are recognized as symptoms of leukemia.”
Before their arrests, the mother had scheduled a medical appointment for her son’s leukemia June 5, when the family was living in the Los Angeles area with her mother, according to the complaint.
The family became immersed in the community, were learning English and would attend church on Sundays, the complaint says. The children also attended school in the area and made friends.
Elora Mukherjee, a Columbia Law School professor and director of the university’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, who is representing the family alongside the Texas Civil Rights Project, told Texas Public Radio that “these are two children who were enrolled in a local public school in Los Angeles, where they focused on the arts.”
“Both kids love painting,” Mukherjee said. “The little boy loved playing soccer in the park.”
“They were embedded and rooted in their community, and their enforced disappearances by the U.S. government should shock all of us,” she added while speaking with the radio station.
The lawsuit calls on government officials to release the family, arguing that they are not a flight risk or a danger to others.
“The government itself decided as much when it paroled them into the United States,” the filing states.
In addition to other forms of relief, the lawsuit asks for a temporary restraining order as well as preliminary and permanent injunctions to prevent the mom and her children from being deported.
“Since arriving at Dilley, (the girl and boy) have cried each night and prayed for God to take them out of the detention center,” the complaint says.
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by Julia Marnin, The Charlotte Observer (TNS)
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