One particularly harrowing incident sheds light on the complexities of immigration enforcement in the United States today. Rosario, a 25-year-old mother, and her children were deported back to Honduras against their will. The deportation took place on April 24, one week after Rosario was arrested during an immigration check-in in New Orleans. This incident quickly raised alarm about the US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) approach to family treatment. This problem is particularly concerning when kids are at stake.
Rosario’s two children—including four-year-old Romeo, who is currently fighting stage 4 kidney cancer—are U.S. citizens. The family’s case shows the urgent, extreme consequences of deportation. Her children are no longer able to receive the specialized medical care that Romeo so badly needs here in Honduras. Romeo was recently diagnosed with cancer at the young age of 2. Since then, he has been through intensive treatment at a different children’s hospital in New Orleans. Unfortunately, despite receiving care at MD Anderson, his situation has gone downhill, with the cancer metastasizing to his lungs.
Given the conditions of their detention and removal, these details are particularly distressing. Rosario had been contacted by ICE with a request for her to sign some paperwork. In response, she denied, arguing that she never agreed to deport her minor children. On the evening they were arrested, she and her kids had been put in a van. From there, they were flown under intelligence service control to a secretive hotel. There, they were detained under opaque conditions with no explanation of where they would end up.
“I just remember we entered through a parking area, not the front,” Rosario recounted of the chaotic night. At 2 o’clock in the morning, the family was suddenly rattled awake. During their three-day ordeal, they then spent four and a half hours stuck in a van at the airport before being deported. During the entire time Rosario was detained she felt helpless, scared and worried for the safety and well-being of her children.
“They never explained to me what was going on or where I was going,” she continued, looking back on how ICE officials misled her. Rosario remembered the guards when they’d see them, to find out where they were going and getting no answer. “They had told me I couldn’t ask anything; I asked where we were going, but they stayed silent,” she said, expressing her frustration and confusion during that terrifying time.
Aside from the loss of life, the emotional impact of the incident has been severe for Rosario and her family. She spoke about how her kids were responding to being locked up. “The kids would try to go toward the door, and the women [guards] would get mad,” she recalled. This experience has left her feeling that her family’s treatment at the hands of ICE was unjust, as she asserted, “This is injustice. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The expedited deportation process has been alarming advocacy groups, who point to systemic racism and discrimination in immigration enforcement practices. Sirine Shebaya, a staff attorney with the National Immigration Project, made note of the humanitarian crisis that family detentions represent. “The Alexandria staging facility is itself already a black hole,” she noted.
GreenbergerShebaya would go on to describe the variety of alarming and often bizarre practices ICE uses to detain people. “In the situation with families, they will often not take them to the facility itself but put them in undisclosed hotel rooms close to the facility.” This policy allows for quick deportations that do not go under full judicial review because of the close proximity of airports.
“They [ICE] seem to funnel as many cases as they can towards that airport so they can fill up the flight and send them out,” Shebaya added, underscoring concerns about the fairness and transparency of such practices.
Rosario’s family was left to grapple with a bleak future in Honduras where they have to deal with threats of extortion and kidnapping. It’s a source of tension for the family that this denial of access to Romeo’s specialized medical care would even be permissible. During their time in New Orleans, he had access to essential, life-saving treatment for his condition that is now threatened by their abrupt displacement.
Advocates are hard at work spreading the word about the burdens that families like Rosario’s are forced to endure. This tragic incident underscores the often hidden complexities and human costs of immigration enforcement policies and practices here in the United States.