According to a report from NPR, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents skirted their own “sensitive locations” policy—which dictates that areas like medical facilities are generally off-limits excluding “exigent circumstances”—in the arrests of an undocumented couple who were rushing their two-month-old baby to a hospital for an emergency, lifesaving procedure.
Initially, Oscar and Irma Sanchez, who have three other U.S. citizen kids, were told that their local hospital wasn’t equipped to do the surgery, and that they would need to take Isaac to Driscoll Children's Hospital in Corpus Christi. But that meant the undocumented parents would have to go through a Border Patrol checkpoint. As they were trying to figure out how they could get their baby to Corpus Christi to save his life, “a Border Patrol agent showed up in the waiting room … perhaps tipped off by a nurse”:
The agent said that the family could be escorted through the checkpoint, but that they would be arrested upon their arrival in Corpus Christi — an arrangement that they agreed to, because it would get their son the surgery.
The Border Patrol followed the ambulance, the night of May 24, as it raced to Corpus through desolate ranchland, carrying Oscar, Irma and tiny Isaac — with an IV in his arm and a tube in his stomach. Once they arrived at Driscoll Children's Hospital, the green-uniformed agents never left the undocumented couple's side. Officers followed the father to the bathroom and the cafeteria and asked the mother to leave the door open when she breast-fed Isaac.
This is your tax dollars at work. "Everywhere we went in the hospital," Oscar said, "they followed us."
CBP claimed to NPR that they were nice enough to always leave “one parent with the baby at all times” while they took the other off-site to fingerprint, book, and expose to possible deportation. At one point, Oscar says, he asked the hospital if they could delay Isaac’s surgery for just a short time until both parents were back onsite. The doctor agreed, and Isaac’s procedure was, thankfully, a success.
CBP claims they didn’t violate their “sensitive locations” policy because no arrests were made at the hospital, despite the fact they were treating a breastfeeding mother and her child no different than they would someone who actually did pose a danger. Neither parents have criminal records. And, there’s no answer yet from Driscoll Children's Hospital if and why a member of their medical staff is moonlighting as a federal immigration agent.
Others aren’t buying CBP’s bullshit either:
Several members of Congress, all Democrats, are troubled just the same. They have proposed the "Protecting Sensitive Locations Act," which would codify protected places in federal law. And it would expand them to include courthouses and bus stops.
"They're pushing the envelope to the point where they're trying to find out how far they can go," says Bronx Rep. Jose Serrano, one of the bill's authors. He is outraged by what happened to the Sanchez family in South Texas. "It violates human decency," he says. "You don't interrupt medical procedures."
As Rep. Serrano notes, unshackled federal immigration agents have been intentionally testing the limits of their power since Donald Trump’s inauguration. Arrests of undocumented immigrants have happened outside of churches, schools, courthouses, and even human trafficking court. Donald Trump is the president rogue agents have been waiting for:
"I can't pretend to understand any reasoning that would have led anyone up the chain of command to think that Irma and Oscar were flight risks or dangers to the community or in any other way people who needed to be followed into a hospital in order to be placed in deportation proceedings," says Lisa Koop, a lawyer with the National Immigrant Justice Center. She will be asking an immigration judge in December to let the Sanchezes remain with their children in the U.S.
"That's how you treat criminals that are harmful, and that's understandable for our own protection," says Ana Hinojosa, an immigrant advocate with the Mennonite Central Committee in Brownsville, who is also working on the case. "But they're a family that's just here trying to make a living, provide an education and a future for their children."