A 6-year-old Honduran boy battling leukemia was detained — along with his family — by President Donald Trump's ICE agents despite following every immigration rule, the boy's lawyer told Salon.
The family's nightmare began when they were seized by plainclothes ICE agents after a court hearing in May.
"The boy and his 9-year-old sister cried every night in detention," attorney Elora Mukherjee told Salon. The government pursued expedited removal while the cancer patient suffered in a Texas detention facility that Biden had shuttered but Trump reopened.
"The Trump administration's policy of detaining people at courthouses who are doing everything right, who are entirely law-abiding, who are trying to fulfill all the requirements that the U.S. government asks of them — it violates our Constitution, it violates our federal laws," Mukherjee said. "It also violates our sense of morality."
The family had fled Honduras after receiving death threats, applied for asylum through proper channels, and waited for permission to enter using a CBP appointment. They never crossed the border illegally, the lawyer said.
"So this particular family did everything right," Mukherjee emphasized.
During their month-long detention at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the boy experienced leukemia symptoms including easy bruising and bone pain. He missed a crucial June 5 cancer appointment. His sister barely ate.
Jeff Migliozzi from Freedom for Immigrants blasted Trump's "aggressive quota of 3,000 daily immigration arrests — a policy pushed by hardliners in the White House like known white nationalist Stephen Miller — is terrorizing communities."
The administration's "bait-and-switch tactics" increasingly target people at scheduled check-ins and courthouses, Migliozzi said. "Here you have people doing everything they can to follow the instructions given to them, and then the rug is pulled out from under them."
The family was released July 2 after public pressure and media coverage, but only after enduring traumatic detention that Mukherjee said "clearly violates both the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment."
"High-level officials in the Department of Homeland Security constantly say that we are targeting the 'worst of the worst,'" Mukherjee noted. "These are the people who are doing everything right."