LOS ANGELES – The Trump administration has revoked permission for a 4-year-old Mexican girl who receives lifesaving medical care from a California hospital to stay in the country, attorneys for the family said on Wednesday.
Lawyer Gina Amato said the girl’s mother was notified the U.S. government was withdrawing the humanitarian parole the family received in 2023 when she brought her ailing child to the U.S.-Mexico border. She received the notifications in April and May and was told the family is subject to potential deportation, Amato said.
Since then, the girl has made it out of the hospital thanks to a treatment that provides intravenous nutrition through a backpack she wears. Lawyers said she isn’t strong enough to survive without it as she suffers from short bowel syndrome, which prevents her from being able to take in and process nutrients on her own, and the treatment she receives isn’t available in Mexico.
“Doctors have been clear that she will die within days” without this care, Amato said at a press conference in Los Angeles. “Deporting this family under these conditions is not only unlawful, it constitutes a moral failure that violates the basic tenets of humanity and decency.”
The attorneys did not provide the girl’s real name to protect her privacy.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services did not immediately comment.
A senior Homeland Security official, in an email sent from an address for media inquiries, said the family is not actively being deported and a more recent application for parole that was filed two weeks ago is still being considered.
The Trump administration has been pushing to dismantle policies from President Joe Biden’s administration that allowed for people to live legally in the U.S., generally for two years.
Humanitarian parole, which doesn’t put migrants on a path to U.S. citizenship, was widely used during the Biden administration to alleviate pressure on the U.S.-Mexico southern border. It was previously used on a case-by-case basis to address individual emergencies and also for people fleeing humanitarian crises around the world including Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos during the late 1970s.
In Mexico, the girl was largely confined to a hospital because of her medical condition, her mother Deysi Vargas told reporters. Once the family arrived at the border, U.S. officials had the child taken to a hospital in San Diego, where she stayed until she was well enough to join a program through Children’s Hospital Los Angeles that allows her to receive treatment at home in Bakersfield, California, Vargas said.
Now, she enjoys going to the park and the supermarket — and above all, living outside a hospital’s walls, Vargas said.
“With the help she has received in the United States, my daughter has the opportunity to leave the hospital, see the world, and live like a girl her age,” Vargas said in Spanish.
Her daughter sat nearby, smiling and playing with stickers, while wearing the black backpack that helps keep her alive.
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles declined to comment for the story,
Attorneys said they have written to U.S. government officials asking if they made a mistake and filed a fresh application for humanitarian parole for the family.
Amato, who is directing attorney of Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said they haven’t received an answer and the notice indicated the family could be deported. She said she has also reached out to elected officials for help.
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