Undocumented Parents Arrested While Awaiting Baby’s Serious Operation

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Mexican Couple Arrested In Waiting Room Of Baby’s Operation

ICE is really grimey.

Oscar and Irma Sanchez, both undocumented immigrants temporarily living in Texas, were arrested while awaiting a serious surgery for their two-month-old son. Reportedly, the couple came into contact with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials back in May while seeking treatment for their son Isaac’s pyloric stenosis, a condition that causes vomiting and weight loss in infants.

Absolutely no hospital could perform the life saving surgery in the Rio Grande Valley area where the couple lives, so they would have to drive to a children’s hospital in Corpus Christi, TX—and past a Border Patrol checkpoint. As the couple sat in a hospital trying to figure out plans for their sick son, a Border Patrol agent turned up in the waiting room. Oscar Sanchez told NPR he suspects a nurse called the authorities on them.

Their tiny, sick son is a U.S. citizen and his operation was covered by medicaid. ICE agents agreed to let him have his surgery they were waiting on, and then arrested the parents as soon as it was finished. What a nightmare!

The Border Patrol followed the ambulance, the night of May 24, as it raced to Corpus through desolate ranchland, carrying Oscar, Irma and tiny Isaac — with an IV in his arm and a tube in his stomach. Once they arrived at Driscoll Children’s Hospital, the green-uniformed agents never left the undocumented couple’s side. Officers followed the father to the bathroom and the cafeteria and asked the mother to leave the door open when she breast-fed Isaac.

“Everywhere we went in the hospital,” Oscar says, “they followed us.”

Get this: Advocacy groups said the treatment the Sanchez family was subjected to is usually reserved for high-value targets like violent gang members or drug traffickers. Neither Oscar nor Irma have a criminal record.