A couple living in Rio Grande Valley, Texas were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials while awaiting their 2-month-old son’s surgery to treat pyloric stenosis.
Oscar and Irma Sanchez made a necessary two-hour drive from their home to Corpus Christi, where the only available pediatric surgery center was located nearby in the Driscoll Children’s Hospital.
The family revealed in an interview with NPR they were undocumented in the states and were required to pass a Border Patrol checkpoint before they were able to make it securely to the hospital for the sensitive operation.
Oscar told NPR hospital staff ordered the couple to go to Driscoll, even after he expressed concern.
‘The nurse told us we had to go there. We said we couldn’t go,’ the infant’s father said, while speaking in Spanish.
An ICE agent reportedly showed up to another hospital in Harlingen, Texas, where the pair and their ill son waited before making the decision to go to Corpus Christi.
A couple living in Rio Grande Valley, Texas were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials while awaiting their 2-month-old son’s surgery to treat pyloric stenosis (family not pictured)
Oscar and Irma Sanchez made a two-hour drive from their home to Corpus Christi, where the only available pediatric surgery center was located nearby at the Driscoll Children’s Hospital (shown)
An ICE agent reportedly showed up to another hospital in Harlingen, Texas, where the pair and their ill son waited before they made the decision to go to Corpus Christi
Oscar believes a nurse at the hospital in Harlingen turned them in.
‘The agent said when they arrived, they would be arrested and put into deportation proceedings. The couple agreed,’ NPR reported of the incident.
On May 24, ICE agents transported Oscar, Irma and baby Issac, who had an IV in his arm and a tube in his stomach in an ambulance to Driscoll.
Officers closely kept an eye on the family once they arrived to the hospital for baby Isaac’s hospital stay, and even followed them to the restroom and ordered mother Irma to keep the door open as she breastfed her sick son.
‘You feel vulnerable,’ Oscar told NPR. ‘We didn’t know if they were going to let us stay with our son or not.
‘Everywhere we went in the hospital, they followed us.’
The next day, agents booked the couple into the Corpus Christi Border Patrol station separately to get fingerprinted.
While at the hospital, the worried pair requested the surgery be postponed until they were able to return and be present. The pair were permitted to return for the operation.
‘Everywhere we went in the hospital, they followed us,’ Oscar Sanchez told NPR
The day after the hospital visit, agents booked the couple into the Corpus Christi Border Patrol station separately to get fingerprinted
Because baby Isaac was a U.S. citizen, the operation was covered under Medicaid.
‘Thank the Lord, everything went well,’ Irma said in the interview. ‘He still throws up a little milk, but thank God he’s fine.’
Chief of the Rio Grande Valley sector of the Border Patrol, Manny Padilla, emailed a statement regarding the matter to the news company.
‘CBP was notified by the Harlingen hospital that there was a child with undocumented parents in need of urgent medical care and that the family would have to go through a checkpoint to the Corpus Christi hospital,’ Manny wrote.
‘To get the child to the care it urgently needed, Border Patrol agents did everything in their power to assist the family, including escorting the ambulance, unimpeded, through the checkpoint.’
Texas is just one of many areas ICE agents are cracking down on immigration policies since President Trump took office.
Lisa Koop, an attorney under National Immigrant Justice Center, said she will request the Sanchez family to allow them to remain in the country come December.
‘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,’ Koop said.