They deported a 2 month old baby who nearly died

[ImStillMags Mags]

On Monday night, a two-month-old baby named Juan Nicolás -- who had been imprisoned at the nation's primary concentration camp for children for nearly half his short life -- was rushed by ambulance to a South Texas emergency room. He had bronchitis. He had been choking on his own vomit. At one point, he became unresponsive.

Hours after he was released from the hospital yesterday, he and his entire family -- his mother, his father, and his 16-month-old sister Mía -- were deported to Mexico. They were left at the border with $190 from their detention commissary account, a sick infant, a toddler, and no phone.

We know what happened next only because of Univision reporter Lidia Terrazas, who had been following Juan Nicolás's case for weeks and crossed into Mexico to find the family. "They were practically abandoned at the border," Terrazas reported. "The baby is still sick. They were left there with the money they had left in their commissary and someone actually gave them a phone on the street -- and that's how she was able to call me."

The family's rapid deportation followed weeks of imprisonment at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas -- a sprawling, for-profit concentration camp for children and families, ringed by razor wire. It is run by the private prison corporation CoreCivic under federal contract, and has amassed a well-documented record of poor conditions and medical neglect.

When Rep. Joaquin Castro visited the facility on January 28, Juan Nicolás was already there -- the youngest detainee in the entire facility. Castro walked into the medical wing. It was empty. Not a doctor. Not a nurse. Not a single medical professional, in the middle of the afternoon, in a facility holding hundreds of children.

That was the facility responsible for keeping an infant alive.

Juan Nicolás had been sick for most of his imprisonment. The conditions at Dilley are notoriously poor, with many of those incarcerated there reporting the water to be virtually undrinkable and worms and mold in the food. Parents report that children get sick frequently, and there was even a measles outbreak last month.

Over the weeks, Juan Nicolás' mother sought care repeatedly, but the medical response was minimal -- the kind of care that has generated more than 700 formal complaints about inadequate medical care from families at Dilley since August alone.

When his condition worsened over the weekend, he began choking on his own vomit at around 3 a.m. Saturday. Guards took him to the medical area. There was no doctor. Staff checked on the infant "to ensure he did not develop a fever" and gave his mother a nasal aspirator.

By Monday evening, it was no longer possible to pretend this meager response was adequate. Juan Nicolás was rushed to a hospital in Pearsall, Texas. He was diagnosed with bronchitis. At some point during the night, he became unresponsive. Despite that, he was discharged around midnight and sent back to Dilley.

Then things moved very fast.

At 8:45 a.m. Tuesday -- less than nine hours after a previously unresponsive infant was returned from the emergency room -- his mother was brought before an immigration judge. She was told she would be deported.

By early evening, the family was gone. Dropped across the border with a sick infant, a toddler, no phone, and almost no money. But at least they weren't DHS' problem anymore.

This incredibly rapid sequence of events suggests that the deportation proceedings against the family were deliberately accelerated. The Trump administration had just been burned -- twice -- by similar cases at the same facility.

In a strikingly similar case weeks earlier, 18-month-old Amalia was hospitalized from Dilley with life-threatening respiratory failure. Amalia had been healthy before ICE arrested her family during a routine check-in in El Paso -- a family that had entered the country legally, applied for asylum through the government's own system, and complied with every requirement.

Inside Dilley, her health deteriorated fast. Her parents took her to the facility clinic eight or nine times. Each visit ended the same way: basic fever medication. By mid-January her blood oxygen plunged into the 50s and she was rushed to a children's hospital in San Antonio. She spent 10 days there, much of it on oxygen in intensive care.

"She was at the brink of dying," said Elora Mukherjee of Columbia Law School's Immigrants' Rights Clinic.

Even given her delicate health, DHS sent the toddler back to Dilley. Once there, detention staff confiscated the nebulizer and medication doctors had prescribed. Her parents waited hours daily in an outdoor queue to request the medicine, only to be turned away.

A physician who reviewed her records warned she faced a "high risk for medical decompensation and death." But because lawyers had time -- nine days -- they filed an emergency habeas corpus petition, and Amalia was freed within hours after the filing.

With Juan Nicolás, the entire sequence from hospital discharge to hearing to deportation was vastly accelerated, leaving no time for legal intervention. By the time his case gained public attention, his family was already across the border with $190.

And in the case of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, held at the same facility, DHS filed a motion to fast-track the family's deportation after widespread press coverage. The family's attorney called it "retaliatory." DHS called it "standard procedure."

Three high-profile cases. Three sick or detained children at the same facility. In two of them, public pressure and legal intervention forced the administration's hand. In the third, the family was gone before either could work.

"To unnecessarily deport a sick baby and his entire family is heinous," Rep. Castro said Tuesday night.

While all of this was happening, DHS issued a statement Tuesday evening about Juan Nicolás' medical care. It said the baby had been transported to the hospital for a "precautionary evaluation," was found stable, and "has since returned to Dilley where medical personnel continue to monitor his health."

The statement concluded with what appears to be DHS's standard boilerplate response to questions about medical care at its detention facilities -- a line it has recycled in multiple DHS press releases: "This is the best healthcare than many aliens have received in their entire lives."

In yet another indication that their incompetence runs as deep as their inhumanity, by the time DHS released that statement, the family had already been deported. They couldn't even get their talking points out before the family was dropped across the border.

Of course, this talking point is also a lie, contradicted by hundreds of complaints, federal lawsuits, and the exposed reality of what actually happens inside Dilley.

Texas Senator John Cornyn, asked about conditions at Dilley that same day, offered the standard Republican response: "I think most of what you're hearing are what I would call horror stories that are largely made up by the mainstream media." His remarks reflect the broader posture of Republicans in Congress toward these repeated cases and extensively documented abuses: deny the existence of the problem and hope it goes away.

While court filings pile up, while hundreds of medical complaints accumulate, while reporters document children choking on their own vomit and being denied prescribed medication -- the response is to call it all a hoax and look the other way.

The National Center for Youth Law has sued the federal government over the horrendous conditions at Dilley, with investigators documenting a litany of horrors in court filings. Food contaminated with worms and mold. Water containers thick with algae. Lights that blaze all night so children can't sleep. Medical neglect so severe that one child's untreated earache led to hearing loss. Parents describe toddlers who now hit themselves in the face out of distress, teenagers who cry themselves to sleep.

An attorney who visited the facility put it bluntly: "The water is putrid. The food has bugs in it."

Families have raised concerns about inadequate medical care on at least 700 occasions since August alone. Despite a legal limit under the Flores settlement of holding children for 20 days, under Trump, many have been imprisoned for months. ProPublica's data analysis found that more than 300 children sent to Dilley by the Trump administration were held for longer than a month.

Eric Lee, a lawyer who represents a family held at the facility for seven months, described it as a "horrible, horrible place," observing that "the guards are just as tough as the guards at the adult facilities... This is not a place that you would want to have your child be for even 15 minutes."

This is the facility where the Trump administration imprisoned a two-month-old baby for nearly half his life -- and then deported him while he was still sick.

All of this -- the abuse, the medical neglect, the imprisonment of infants -- is immensely profitable for the corporation running it.

CoreCivic donated more than $800,000 to Trump's campaign and inauguration. The day after Trump was elected, CoreCivic's stock price jumped nearly 30 percent. Last year, the company posted $2.2 billion in revenue -- an all-time high.

On a recent earnings call, an investor complained that ICE detentions were still "below what investors thought it was going to be." CoreCivic CEO Patrick Swindle was quick to reassure investors eager to profit from the imprisonment of children and families. "As that ecosystem grows," Swindle told them, "it's gonna result in additional bed demand."

The cruelty isn't just the point -- it's the business model.

None of this has anything to do with targeting "the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens" -- the phrase the Trump administration repeats endlessly to justify its immigration crackdown.

"The President's entire team, including Border Czar Tom Homan and Secretary Noem, are on the same page when it comes to implementing his agenda -- which has always focused on prioritizing the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens," the White House said just this week.

ICE's own numbers expose the lie. Internal DHS data reveals that nearly three-quarters of people booked into custody since October had no criminal convictions. Just 5 percent had any type of violent conviction. The share of detainees with any criminal record has collapsed -- from 62 percent in January to 31 percent by November -- and even those with records are overwhelmingly traffic violations and misdemeanors.

At Dilley, it's even more extreme. According to a recent report by ProPublica, 99% of those imprisoned have no criminal history.

While the Trump administration talks endlessly about killers, rapists, gang members, terrorists, pedophiles, here's the reality of who is being targeted.

It's families, workers, asylum seekers, children, and even babies.

Juan Nicolás is two months old. His sister Mía is sixteen months old. Their crime was existing inside the borders of a country where their parents sought safety.

As for the family -- the baby is still sick. Terrazas met with them Tuesday night at a hotel they were able to pay for with their $190. Juan Nicolás's mother, Mireya López Sánchez, told Terrazas that the family was in distress -- sent back to the country they had fled, with a sick infant and virtually nothing.

A GoFundMe campaign has been set up for the family by people appalled at the treatment of a sick infant and his family at the hands of the most powerful government on earth.

Juan Nicolás's case is the latest -- and among the most disturbing -- in a growing list of cases forcing into public view what is happening to children inside America's concentration camp for children. Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old in the bunny hat. Amalia, the toddler at the brink of dying. Diana Crespo, the 7-year-old arrested on her way to the doctor. Hundreds of others whose names we don't know, still trapped behind those walls.

Every one of these cases adds to the growing demand to end the detention of children -- particularly at a facility with Dilley's documented record of horror. Food with worms. Water thick with algae. Babies choking in the night with no doctor in sight. A for-profit corporation posting record revenue while infants suffer in its care -- all paid for with American taxpayer dollars.

The administration wants you to look away. Don't.

Call your members of Congress. Demand an end to child detention. Demand accountability for what was done to Juan Nicolás and his family, and for the hundreds of children still trapped inside.

If you've had enough of the cruelty and the lies, here's how to take action.

--> Call your representatives at (202) 224-3121 and demand the immediate release of all children from the Dilley and Karnes detention centers and an end to child detention.

--> Democracy Forward, a national legal organization, is doing tremendous work on litigation against the Trump administration's immigration policies, including multiple lawsuits focused on detainee conditions. To support their critical work, visit https://democracyforward.org/

--> To learn more about DHS' current efforts to vastly expand their detention facilities, including ones for children, you can learn about their efforts to buy massive warehouses around the country at https://wapo.st/3OfarSk -- and about community opposition to their plans at https://wapo.st/3OIfSJn

--> The first step to oppose such expansion is to learn about any plans for your state, and then connect with others to oppose warehouse detention centers in your state. Connect with local immigrant rights groups and/or local Indivisible chapter to see if there are current efforts already underway to support. To find an Indivisible group in your area, visit https://indivisible.org/groups

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To read about Juan Nicolás' deportation, visit https://www.newsweek.com/2-month-old-family-deported-to...

To read more about the private prison contractors celebrating 'growth opportunities,' visit https://time.com/.../ice-immigration-detention.../

For an in-depth new article by The New York Times about ICE's detention of children, visit https://www.nytimes.com/.../migrant-children-ice...

To read a new ProPublica piece about "The Children of Dilley," visit https://www.propublica.org/.../life-inside-ice-dilley...

To read more about Amalia, the toddler who nearly died after being imprisoned at Dilley, visit https://www.nbcnews.com/.../toddler-hospitalized-dilley...

[BEZARK]

The French had guillotines for ridding itself of rich conservative scum.

We have  electricity.

We don't need electric chairs.

We need electric benches.

Electric pews.

Electric  bleachers.

Electric stadiums.

How does America recover from such Nazi treatment of innocent civilians?

Run directly or indirectly by government.

Tolerated, nay encouraged, by citizen dregs.

Short of violently crushing it,  what with the rigged elections.

Ah well, one can dream.

[rivcuban]

Everywhere Republicans go, there is death and suffering. 

[Irie]

Get a job, pillow biter.

[BEZARK]

Mannish  (trans?) Twit  would empty  an Uzi clip into a Palestinian pram, such is her lack of feeling for children.