An 11-year-old girl who is a U.S. citizen and is recovering from a rare brain tumor has been living in Mexico since immigration authorities removed her from Texas when they deported her undocumented parents four months ago.
Four of her siblings, three of whom are also U.S. citizens, were also sent to Mexico with the parents.
Since then, the girl’s health condition has not improved, her mother told NBC News. In an attempt to return to the United States to get her the care she needs, the family applied for humanitarian parole with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on Thursday.
“We’re fighting for my girl’s life,” the mother said, adding that her daughter isn’t recovering from “just any disease. … She is not going to be cured overnight; it’s something that takes time.”
Their request is for the undocumented parents and the girl’s noncitizen sibling to be allowed to enter and live in the U.S. temporarily, so that the ailing girl can have “the full support of her family as she gets treatment to help save her life,” said Danny Woodward of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a legal advocacy organization representing the family.
The mother said her daughter’s headaches and dizziness have worsened. The symptoms have become so recurrent that the girl’s parents spend sleepless nights taking turns monitoring and caring for her.
“She is very scared,” mother said. “We want to be there for her, we want to take care of her 100% like we’ve been doing so far. We don’t want to be separated from her for even a minute.”
When the girl was in the U.S., under the care of doctors in Houston “who saved her life,” the parents were instructed to rush her to the hospital for an emergency check-up whenever she felt these symptoms, the mother said.
“But out here, that is impossible,” she said in Spanish from Mexico, where her family was deported to Monterrey, an area known for the kidnapping of U.S. citizens. “Where am I going to go?”
NBC News is not publishing the family members’ names out of concerns for their safety.
Medical records show the child underwent surgery last year to remove a brain tumor caused by an “unnamed ‘novel’ condition,” according to Woodward. This means that few medical specialists can effectively treat and monitor her.
The mother said the girl’s doctors in the U.S. were not just treating her daughter’s illness; they were “also studying it because they don’t know what caused it, why it was so aggressive.” Even from Mexico, she has been in touch with the girl’s doctors in the U.S., but they can’t really assess what’s happening to her from afar.
The surgery that saved her life last year did leave the girl with some lasting side effects. The swelling on her brain is still not fully gone, causing difficulties with speech and mobility of the right side of her body as well as memory problems. These require the girl to routinely checking in with doctors monitoring her recovery, get MRI scans every three months, attend rehabilitation therapy sessions and take medication to prevent seizures.
But she has not been able to consistently access this care since the family was deported, her mother and attorney said.
The mother insists that the rod fixator preventing her daughter’s right foot from turning inward needs to be replaced, as the girl trips more than usual.
Her seizure medication is being sent to her from the United States because the family can’t find the exact one she needs in Mexico, Woodward said. MRIs have also “turned out to be very expensive and challenging for the family to get in Mexico.”
The girl has only been able to get one medical checkup and MRI in Monterrey. The experience made the mother realize how difficult it would be to get a new doctor in Mexico who can get up to speed with her daughter’s medical history and treat her illness.
“Not any doctor wants to take on such a huge commitment,” the mother said. “It’s like starting from scratch, or worse.”
Additionally, “the stress of the whole situation has definitely played a negative role” in the girl’s recovery, Woodward said. “This family has been severely traumatized.”
A family’s ‘truncated dreams’
On Feb. 3, the family was driving from the Rio Grande Valley area, where they lived, to Houston, where the girl’s doctors are based, for an emergency medical checkup.
On the way, they stopped at a stateside immigration checkpoint, one they have passed through multiple times. But this time, immigration authorities arrested the parents after they were unable to show legal immigration documentation. Five of their children, ages 15, 13, 11, 8 and 6, were with them when they were arrested.
Woodward said the parents have never done anything to make them a priority for removal. The entire family was taken to a detention facility, where they spent 24 hours before they were placed in a van and dropped on the Mexico side of a Texas bridge on Feb. 4.
“Another layer of this is the fact that the parents were never even given their due process rights, so they never were allowed to go in front of an immigration judge to plead their case,” said Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees USCIS, previously told NBC News that reports of the family’s situation are “inaccurate” and declined to speak on the specifics of the case, citing privacy reasons. They said in a statement that when “someone is given expedited removal orders and chooses to disregard them, they will face the consequences.”
The eldest son, an 18-year-old U.S. citizen, was left behind in the U.S.
“The older boy woke up one morning and learned that his entire family was gone,” Woodward said. He graduated high school alone, without his family.
“It breaks our hearts,” the mother said as she wept, adding that her son dreams of going to college and becoming a neurosurgeon after seeing how doctors saved his sister’s life, but “he can’t do that alone. He needs our support — even though we talk to him every day, it’s really hard to be away.”
Instead of going to college, her son is working a fast-food job, hoping to soon see his family return home.
While the Trump administration has aggressively stepped up the pace of deportations, including for immigrants who don’t have criminal charges or convictions against them, there are three recent cases giving the girl’s family hope.
A Mexican mother living in California and her 4-year-old girl, who suffers from a life-threatening intestinal illness, were granted humanitarian parole this month following a public plea for deportation relief. In April, a Venezuelan immigrant in Chicago was released from immigration detention under humanitarian parole to serve as an organ donor for his ailing brother. In March, an undocumented mother in California caring for her 21-year-old daughter, a U.S. citizen undergoing treatment for bone cancer, was detained by immigration authorities and later released “for humanitarian reasons.”
Even though the relatives in these cases were not deported, Woodward said, “I don’t think that should make any difference from the perspective of the federal government.”
“It’s a discretionary choice for them to make,” he said. “Our case, I think, it’s a very strong one for humanitarian parole.”
The family’s parole application includes letters of support from several members of Congress, including Democratic Reps. Adriano Espaillat of New York and Sylvia Garcia and Joaquin Castro of Texas, all of whom met with the family in Mexico last month.
“We want them to give us that chance,” the mother said. “We are not criminals. We are not delinquents. We simply want to save our daughter.”
