Family of U.S. Girl Recovering From Rare Brain Tumor Determined to Return After Deportation

Sunday was the 11th birthday of a girl who is getting better from a rare brain tumor. She was hundreds of miles away from her home, her school friends, and her church group.

Three months ago, when their undocumented parents were removed from Texas, four U.S. citizen children were sent to Mexico without them.

The mixed-immigration family was taken to a part of Mexico that is known for kidnapping U.S. citizens. They are afraid for their safety, but they still want to come back to the U.S., mostly to keep the girl’s medical care going.

The family will be going to Monterrey on Friday morning to meet with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. A family spokesperson said that they hope that telling lawmakers about their immigration problems will encourage them to push for their release under humanitarian parole.

Members of Congress are listening to the public’s concerns about deporting vulnerable US citizen children, according to Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, the group that is representing the family in court and legal matters. She told NBC News on Thursday.

A representative from the Texas Civil Rights Project said that Democratic Reps. Adriano Espaillat of New York and Sylvia Garcia and Joaquin Castro of Texas are going to meet with the family.

Garza said, “It’s important for people to keep paying attention to this and for people to keep talking to and encouraging members of Congress to do something.”

In March, the girl’s mother told NBC News about what was going on with her family. Other lawmakers in Congress, such as Democratic Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Alex Padilla of California and Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, paid attention to the case.

Since then, five more cases like this have come to light. One of these is the story of a mother who was returned to Honduras last month with her two U.S. citizen children, one of whom is a 4-year-old boy with Stage 4 cancer.

Garza said, “It wouldn’t surprise me if this was much more systemic than what we are seeing right now.”

How it all began

The mother had told NBC News that on February 3, the family was going from where they lived in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, to Houston, where their daughter’s specialist doctors are located, for an urgent medical checkup.

On their way there, they stopped at a customs checkpoint in the United States that they had been through before. They had letters from their doctors and lawyers with them to show the police at the stop.

But the parents were arrested by immigration officials when they couldn’t show proper immigration papers. Daniel Woodward, their lawyer, says that the parents have “no criminal history” other than not having “valid immigration status in the U.S.” He also said that the parents were in the process of getting T visas, which are limited immigration benefits for people who have been trafficked.

When they were taken, five of their children, ages 15, 13, 11, 8, and 6, were with them. Four of them are U.S. citizens. The parents and children were taken to a jail and held there for 24 hours. On February 4, they were put in a van and dropped off on the Mexico side of a Texas bridge.

For safety reasons, NBC News is not putting out the names of the family members.

Families’ lawyers asked the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties to look into claims that the family was abused while being held in U.S. prison in March. In the filing, they also asked that the parents who were not in the country legally, the girl, and one of her brothers be given humanitarian parole.

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