Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have detained 10-year-old Rosamaria Hernandez, a special needs child who has lived in the United States since she was an infant, reports the New York Times. Rosamaria was being taken by ambulance to Driscoll Children's Hospital for gallbladder surgery when they had to go through a Border Patrol checkpoint. According to the girl’s family, agents allowed them to pass but followed the ambulance to the hospital, apparently stalking the child outside her room as she recovered from the procedure. Hours later, agents took Rosamaria, who has cerebral palsy, into custody. Are you feeling safer yet, America?
By Wednesday evening, according to family members and advocates involved in her case, immigration agents had taken her to a facility in San Antonio where migrant children who arrive alone in the United States from Central America are usually held, even though her parents, who both lack legal status, live 150 miles away in Laredo.
Her placement there highlighted the unusual circumstances of her case: The federal government maintains detention centers for adult immigrants it plans to deport, facilities for families who arrive at the border together and shelters for children who come by themselves, known as unaccompanied minors. But it is rare, if not unheard-of, for a child already living in the United States to be arrested — particularly one with a serious medical condition.
As Splinter notes, Rosamaria “is now being treated as if her family doesn’t exist.” Immigration officials could release her to her parents or relatives already in Texas, but instead they’ve kept her detained. She should be at Driscoll Children’s Hospital’s continuing to receive care, but the cruel treatment of undocumented families is a feature, not a bug, of the administration’s handling of immigration enforcement. In the short six months that he was head of Homeland Security, John Kelly turned the department into “a deportation machine,” leaving some women to reportedly give birth at home because they were afraid going to a hospital would expose their immigration status, as was Rosamaria’s case.
Rosamaria’s detainment by Border Patrol agents goes beyond exposing the administration’s ongoing lie that they’re targeting only “bad hombres” for arrest and deportation. As Tom Jawetz, Vice President of Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress noted, “hospitals used to be sensitive locations, off-limits to routine deportation efforts. No more.” In fact, Rosamaria’s family said that immigration agents even used the ambulance ride to the hospital as a chance to get them to sign papers that would have sent the girl to Mexico:
Rosamaria’s cousin, Aurora Cantu, a United States citizen who was riding with her in the ambulance and accompanied her to the hospital, told Rosamaria’s mother and others working on the case that the agents had at first tried to persuade the family to agree to have the girl transferred to a Mexican hospital, pressing the family to sign a voluntary departure form for her. They declined to do so. The entire time Rosamaria was in surgery and then in recovery, several armed Border Patrol agents stood outside her hospital room, the family said.
“The fact that they spent so much time and resources to follow this girl, said Priscila Martinez, an organizer with the Workers Defense Action Fund, “to treat her like she was the highest-priority criminal that ever walked on this earth—the way they’re treating her is just beyond what a 10-year-old special needs child should be treated.” Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar added that “we should be devoting our resources and focus on bigger threats.” Yes we should be, but this is a mass deportation administration hellbent on kicking brown people out, even if it means they have to wait outside hospital rooms like spiders in order to detain little girls:
Rosamaria’s doctors have recommended that she be released to a relative because of her illness, said Alma Ruiz, a San Antonio-based lawyer who is part of a team representing the family. But the immigration agency has not yet consented to release her.