The essence of evil. Listen to Jacob Soboroff who draws on the the United Nations' definition and describes what our government did to these parents and families seeking asylum in the U.S.—to ultimately, over 5,400 children—as "torture." Based on a show of hands of numerous people that met at the white house that included Mike Pompeo, Alex Azar, the American Academy of Pediatrics referred to this as "government-sanctioned child abuse," with serious, "irreversible" consequences, as noted by the American College of Physicians.

Though Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen did not raise her hand to Miller's request for a vote, we must note that

"No one in the meeting made the case that separating families would be inhumane or immoral, the officials said. Any moral argument about immigration "fell on deaf ears" inside the White House, one of the officials said."

Such appalling cruelty. Yet where is the justice?

Let's vote this brutal, fascist regime out of office, my friends.

-Angela Valenzuela

Trump Cabinet officials voted in 2018 White House meeting to separate migrant children, say officials

"If we don't enforce this, it is the end of our country as we kno

White House policy adviser Stephen Miller at the Ohio Republican 

Party State Dinner in Columbus in 2018.Leah Millis / Reuters file

Aug. 20, 2020, 2:15 PM CDT 2:15 PM CDT

By Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff

WASHINGTON — In early May 2018, after weeks of phone calls and private meetings, 11 of the president's most senior advisers were called to the White House Situation Room, where they were asked, by a show-of-hands vote, to decide the fate of thousands of migrant parents and their children, according to two officials who were there.

President Donald Trump's senior adviser Stephen Miller led the meeting, and, according to the two officials, he was angry at what he saw as defiance by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

It had been nearly a month since Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, had launched the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, announcing that every immigrant who crossed the U.S. border illegally would be prosecuted, including parents with small children. But so far, U.S. border agents had not begun separating parents from their children to put the plan into action, and Miller, the architect of the administration's crackdown on undocumented immigrants, was furious about the delay.

Those invited included Sessions, Nielsen, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and newly installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to documents obtained by NBC News.

Trump cabinet officials voted in 2018 meeting to separate migrant children, say officials

AUG. 20, 202003:55

Nielsen told those at the meeting that there were simply not enough resources at DHS, nor at the other agencies that would be involved, to be able to separate parents, prosecute them for crossing the border and return them to their children in a timely manner, according to the two officials who were present. Without a swift process, the children would enter into the custody of Health and Human Services, which was already operating at near capacity.

Two officials involved in the planning of "zero tolerance" said the Justice Department acknowledged on multiple occasions that U.S. attorneys would not be able to prosecute all parents expeditiously, so sending children to HHS was the most likely outcome.

As Nielsen had said repeatedly to other officials in the weeks leading up to the meeting, according to two former officials, the process could get messy and children could get lost in an already clogged system.

Two years later: Family separations at the border

JULY 12, 202004:43

Miller saw the separation of families not as an unfortunate byproduct but as a tool to deter more immigration. According to three former officials, he had devised plans that would have separated even more children. Miller, with the support of Sessions, advocated for separating all immigrant families, even those going through civil court proceedings, the former officials said.

While zero tolerance ultimately separated nearly 3,000 children from their parents, what Miller proposed would have separated 25,000 more, including those who legally presented themselves at ports of entry seeking asylum, according to Customs and Border Protection data from May and June 2018.

That plan never came to fruition, in large part because DHS officials had argued it would grind the immigration process to a halt. But after Sessions' announcement that all families entering illegally would be prosecuted, the onus had fallen on DHS to act.

Nielsen claims 'there was no policy to separate families' of migrants

JULY 23, 202002:38

At the meeting, Miller accused anyone opposing zero tolerance of being a lawbreaker and un-American, according to the two officials present.

"If we don't enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it," Miller said, according to the two officials. It was not unusual for Miller to make claims like that, but this time he was adamant that the policy move forward, regardless of arguments about resources and logistics.

No one in the meeting made the case that separating families would be inhumane or immoral, the officials said. Any moral argument about immigration "fell on deaf ears" inside the White House, one of the officials said.

"Miller was tired of hearing about logistical problems," one of the officials said. "It was just 'Let's move forward and staff will figure this out.'"

Frustrated, Miller accused Nielsen of stalling and demanded a show of hands. Who was in favor of moving forward? he asked.

A sea of hands went up. Nielsen kept hers down. It was clear she had been outvoted, according to the officials.

In the days immediately following the meeting, Nielsen had a conversation with Kevin McAleenan, then the Customs and Border Patrol commissioner, in her office at the Ronald Reagan Building and then signed a memo instructing DHS personnel to prosecute all migrants crossing the border illegally, including parents arriving with their children.

Nielsen did so despite her stated reservations in the Situation Room and her having been warned in a legal memo by DHS General Counsel John Mitnick — which was also sent to her chief of staff at the time, Chad Wolf, who is now the acting secretary of DHS — that the decision would result in separation of families. Of the practice, Mitnick wrote, "a court could conclude that the separations are violative of the INA, Administrative Procedure Act, or the Fifth Amendment Due Process clause."

Less than two months later, Trump signed an executive order halting family separations and a federal judge in California ordered family reunifications on the grounds that the separated families' due process rights were violated.

At the time, no plan was in place to track the children who had been separated or to create a system to reunite thousands of separated families, according to the two former officials.

According to an invitation list obtained by NBC News, those expected to be in attendance at the meeting included: Sessions, Nielsen, Miller, Pompeo, Azar, Undersecretary of Defense John Rood, then-White House chief of staff John Kelly, White House deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell, then-White House counsel Don McGahn and Marc Short, who was then director of legislative affairs and is now chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence.

November: Emails show how Stephen Miller promoted anti-immigrant views

NOV. 14, 201903:44

Asked about the show-of-hands vote, Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said, "This is absolutely not true and did not happen."

In response to a request for a comment about the meeting and the show of hands, HHS spokesman Michael Caputo said, "This never happened."

The State Department and DHS referred NBC News to the White House. Sessions, Nielsen, Kelly and John Bolton did not respond to requests for comment. McGahn and Rood could not be reached for comment.

Before Trump ended zero tolerance by executive order on June 20, 2018, over 2,800 children had been separated from their parents. When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to begin reuniting the families it had separated, it became clear that there was no method to track both parent and child as they moved through the system. As a result, some took months to reunite, and, in hundreds of cases, parents were deported from the U.S. without their children.

On May 4, Gary Tomasulo, who was then the senior director for border and transportation security on the National Security Council, sent an email to the deputies and lower-level staffers tasked with carrying out immigration policy, telling them that their bosses had agreed to the new zero tolerance prosecution and separation policy and that they needed to develop plans to support it.

At the time, some of the subordinates to the Cabinet secretaries who were responsible for carrying out zero tolerance had raised moral objections, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

In the email, obtained by NBC News, Tomasulo told the deputies and other subordinates that their bosses "acknowledged that there are no easy solutions, but remained committed to collectively do everything possible to develop innovative solutions that leverage the full resources, capabilities, and authorities of the U.S. government."

He went on to say, "I ask that if you are unable to participate in these meetings, the message of commitment and resolve expressed by our principals is communicated and internalized by those that represent your departments and agencies."

Julia Ainsley

Julia Ainsley is a correspondent covering the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

Jacob Soboroff

Jacob Soboroff is a correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC and author of the New York Times bestseller "Separated: Inside an American Tragedy."

 

10 Years Old, Tearful and Confused After a Sudden Deportation

Look at what is happening to #TrumpsChildren.  I use this hashtag not to refer to his biological children but rather to the traumatized children whose families legally sought asylum in the U.S. that he continues to terrorize through his policies and administrative decisions. 

He, as well as this situation, reminds me so much of the late Nicolae Ceaușescu, a Romanian tyrant about whom I recently blogged whose policy decisions surrounding children were brazenly harmful to no less than 100,000 children, that history remembers him and them in the encapsulating phrase, "Ceausescu's children."

As the article here graphically shows, a whole generation of largely Central American children and their parents are indelibly impacted by Trump's inhumane immigrant and detention policies, with COVID-19 making matters worse.  

It just breaks your heart. 💔

-Angela Valenzuela

#TrumpsChildren

#FreeThemAll #FreeTheChildren

#FamiliesBelongTogether

#CeausescusChildren

10 Years Old, Tearful and Confused 

After a Sudden Deportation

Since the coronavirus broke out, the Trump administration has deported hundreds of migrant children alone — in some cases, without notifying their families.

·       

By Caitlin Dickerson | 

May 20, 2020 | New York Times

·        

The last time Sandra Rodríguez saw her son Gerson, she bent down to look him in the eye. “Be good,” she said, instructing him to behave when he encountered Border Patrol agents on the other side of the river in the United States, and when he was reunited with his uncle in Houston.

The 10-year-old nodded, giving his mother one last squinty smile. Tears caught in his dimples, she recalled, as he climbed into a raft and pushed out across the Rio Grande toward Texas from Mexico, guided by a stranger who was also trying to reach the United States.

Ms. Rodríguez expected that Gerson would be held by the Border Patrol for a few days and then transferred to a government shelter for migrant children, from which her brother in Houston would eventually be able to claim him. But Gerson seemed to disappear on the other side of the river. For six frantic days, she heard nothing about her son — no word that he had been taken into custody, no contact with the uncle in Houston.

Finally, she received a panicked phone call from a cousin in Honduras who said that Gerson was with her. The little boy was crying and disoriented, his relatives said; he seemed confused about how he had ended up back in the dangerous place he had fled.

PSYCHOLOGICAL TOLL

"Taking Children" by Laura Briggs

The book, Taking Children, authored by Laura Briggs, "argues that for four hundred years the United States has taken children for political ends. Black children, Native children, Latinx children, and the children of the poor have all been seized from their kin and caregivers.": 

'You have to take the children away.'   --Donald Trump  

Just the title of this book makes me shudder.

What are we hearing, I ask myself, about "Trump's children," kidnapped from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border? What do we know about the 400 migrant children that he booted out of the country under new Coronavirus rules in early April?!!

As I write this I can't help but think of former Romanian president qua dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. Just keyword search "Ceausescus" and "orphans" in Google and a lot of dreadful stories and documentaries turn up. Here's a testimonial account in The Guardian. Ceausescus himself was one of the most despotic dictators of his time.

Hence, these are #TrumpsChildren and this important detail of history should forever be associated with him and recognized as among the greatest atrocities against humanity of his administration.

-Angela Valenzuela

#TrumpsChildren

#FreeThemAll #FreeTheChildren

#FamiliesBelongTogether

#CeausescusChildren

Bastrop County Sheriff’s Policy Leads To Jump In Immigrant Arrests

Though not an unfamiliar story, this one still made me feel very sad and angry.  All I ask is that us Texans all put ourselves in these families' shoes and feel deeply the terror, humiliation and inhumanity to which they are regularly subjected. This is unacceptable what's happening to our immigrant community.

Shame on Bastrop's Sheriff Cook for preying on these defenseless families who are here to make a better life for themselves and in the process, our country, too.  We must all surely know by now that in the current moment, immigrants are essential workers, holding jobs as agricultural workers, custodial staff, nursing home workers, construction, and so on.  

What I hope this COVID pandemic reveals is that they have always been critical infrastructure workers.  Our country relies heavily on them. We need them, as a country.  And rather than exploiting and persecuting them, we should honor them and compensate their work well.  

Note: Consider signing onto this Essential Worker Bill of Rights.

Moreover, our local sheriffs and police forces should look in the mirror and disavow these fascist, pathological, white supremacist ways of of treating people who are native to this continent. 

We didn't cross the border.  The border crossed us.  There's nowhere else for us "to go back to."  We are of this land.  We are Indigenous.  

#StopTheCruelty

-Angela Valenzuela

Bastrop County Sheriff’s Policy Leads To Jump In Immigrant Arrests 

Sheriff Maurice Cook denies racial profiling as numbers of Hispanics jailed for minor traffic violations climb precipitously year over year

Story Brandon Mulder Austin American-Statesman

Images by Lola Gomez Austin American-Statesman

Published April 24, 2020

The humble life Karina Flores and her husband had created in Bastrop County crumbled on Sept. 19.

He worked installing insulation. She tended to their three children — two of whom were diagnosed with hemophilia — while taking occasional shifts in a food truck. Together, they had just bought a mobile home in western Bastrop County.

Before dawn on that September day, Flores’ husband had just pulled out of their new Del Valle neighborhood when flashing red and blue lights appeared in his rearview mirror. He had rolled through a stop sign, the Bastrop County Sheriff’s deputy told him. When the deputy asked for his driver’s license, he presented his Mexican ID instead. He was charged for driving without a driver’s license and arrested.

That was the last time Flores saw her husband.

At the jail, the sheriff’s office found he was an undocumented immigrant. He was turned over to federal custody for deportation proceedings. He broke the news to his wife over the jail phone. Instantly, she became a single mother, struggling alone to pay the mortgage while caring for severely ill children who require frequent hospital treatments.

Her eyes welled with tears when she recalled first hearing the news. “Se me cayó el mundo,” she said. My world fell.

Flores’ husband, whom she asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, is one of hundreds of people in Bastrop County who have found themselves in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody after being stopped and arrested for minor traffic violations.

An American-Statesman analysis of arrest records found that the number of immigrants the Bastrop County sheriff’s office turned over to immigration officials grew by nearly 80% in 2019 compared with the previous year. At the heart of that increase is a policy implemented by Sheriff Maurice Cook on Feb. 1, 2019, ordering the arrest of anyone found driving without insurance, without a driver’s license or with a suspended driver’s license — all Class C misdemeanors punishable by a fine only for first-time offenders.

Immigrant advocates say the directive encourages racial profiling and is a deliberate effort to target undocumented immigrants for deportation. Residents in the immigrant community say the sheriff’s measures are stoking fear in an already vulnerable population. This fear, they say, has irreversibly strained the relationship between the community and law enforcement and makes Bastrop County less safe. Seldom, now, do immigrants dial 911 to report crimes, advocates say.

Cook said the order is not racially motivated, but is aimed at improving safety on the county’s roads. In 2018, Bastrop County had the third-highest rate of traffic fatalities per capita among counties with populations of 50,000 or greater — higher than any of Texas’ major metropolitan areas, according to state data.

“Since Bastrop County is one of the leading counties in Texas for traffic fatalities, the intended purpose of this (policy) is to start with the basic premise that any driver not in compliance with our traffic laws is irresponsible and a hazard to those lawfully using our roadways,” Cook wrote in his policy memo, which the Statesman obtained under the Texas Public Information Act.

Cook’s policy launched as several Texas lawmakers have made efforts to curb arrests for fine-only traffic offenses in the wake of high-profile jail deaths, such as that of Sandra Bland, who died of suicide in a Waller County jail after being detained for failing to signal a turn.

For Flores, the pall of fear the Bastrop County sheriff’s office has cast permeates all corners of her life.

“It’s almost unbearable to be living with this fear — the fear of not knowing when they’re going to arrest me, and not knowing when I’m going to be deported, of not being able to actually enjoy a day with my kids,” Flores said in Spanish. “It’s a big fear, and it’s too much.”

Some candles with the images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Jesus 

Christ are displayed March 4 on the dining room table in the small

 trailer where Miriam Jaimes and her three children live in Del Valle.

New directive

That September arrest sent Flores’ husband on a journey through the belly of the U.S. immigration system that ultimately spat him out into the perilous borderlands.

From the Bastrop County Jail, he was eventually transferred to a detention facility in Pearsall where, despite his clean criminal history, he failed to obtain an immigration bond. His request for asylum was denied, too. After about two months in detention, a deportation order placed him on a bus to Nuevo Laredo. Mexico.

Like many migrants deported to the cartel-dominated Mexican border state of Tamaulipas, he was abducted, Flores said. One month she was paying her husband’s immigration attorney’s fees, and the next she was paying his ransom.

In 2019, 430 people were arrested in Bastrop County for one of the three misdemeanors covered in Cook’s policy, up from 99 in 2018. About 70% of those arrested, 306, had Hispanic surnames.

Of those, 115 were transferred to ICE custody — a 505% increase from the previous year, when 19 people arrested for one of those three misdemeanors ended up in the hands of ICE.

In 2017, Texas lawmakers adopted a statewide ban on so-called sanctuary cities, requiring local law enforcement to cooperate with immigration officials. ICE detainees from the Bastrop County sheriff’s office have grown from 105 in 2017 to 343 in 2019, according to jail records.

Court records also show that drivers with Hispanic surnames were more than twice as likely to be stopped and arrested or ticketed for one of the three charges. Of the 3,217 people who were pulled over in 2019 and either arrested or ticketed for one of the three charges, two-thirds, or 2,202 people, had Hispanic surnames.

Austin-area advocates and immigration attorneys started seeing an unexpected increase in calls from Bastrop County shortly after the policy took effect. They say the sheriff’s office is unfairly targeting the county’s Hispanic populations. While 71% of those arrested for one of the three charges in 2019 had Hispanic surnames, only about 36% of the county’s population is Hispanic or Latino, according to census estimates.

The stories they heard from clients were uncannily similar: A Hispanic driver stopped for a minor violation, like failing to signal a lane change, leading to an arrest for driving without a license or insurance, resulting in immigration proceedings.

“It’s a very conscious and deliberate attempt to target and deport people from Bastrop,” immigration attorney Jose ‘Chito’ Vela III said.

To Vela, the policy smacks of the same racial profiling that immigrant activist groups say was behind a “zero tolerance” traffic enforcement operation in 2018 that targeted heavily Hispanic neighborhoods in Bastrop County.

“

It’s a very conscious and deliberate attempt to target and deport people from Bastrop.

Jose ‘Chito’ Vela III

Immigration attorney

That daylong operation was detailed in a memo in which deputies were instructed to arrest for driver’s license and insurance violations around the heavily Hispanic Del Valle and Stony Point neighborhoods. The result was 28 arrests and 16 ICE detainers.

Cook said in 2018 he was shocked by the number of people who were arrested for not having a driver’s license and then picked up by ICE. “That certainly wasn’t the intent,” he said at the time.

Cook said his 2019 policy is not intended to target Hispanic neighborhoods and does not encourage racial profiling. Deputies, he said, can use some amount of discretion when deciding whom to arrest. He said the policy was a response to an incident in which a deputy stopped a woman who was driving without an ID.

He said she gave false identification using the name and address of someone for whom she worked as a house cleaner. A deputy issued a ticket under the false name and, after the ticket went unpaid, the woman named on the ticket received notification in the mail that a warrant would be issued for her arrest. Upset and confused, she paid a visit to the sheriff’s office, and the sheriff’s office dismissed the charge.

“

I’m not going to apologize for enforcing the laws that the citizens of Bastrop County expect me to enforce. My goal is to make Bastrop a safer place to live and raise our families and work.

Maurice Cook

Bastrop County Sheriff

Arresting drivers without licenses, he said, will prevent that kind of mix-up.

“I’m not going to apologize for enforcing the laws that the citizens of Bastrop County expect me to enforce,” Cook said. “My goal is to make Bastrop a safer place to live and raise our families and work.”

The data indicate, however, that the policy did little to curb fatalities on Bastrop County highways. In 2018, the year the county ranked third statewide in per capita traffic fatalities, 32 people were killed on Bastrop County roads, according to state data. In 2019, that number climbed to 33, and the county ranked first in per capita fatalities among counties with populations of 50,000 or more. Thirty of those deaths occurred after Cook’s policy was adopted.

A Bastrop County sheriff’s deputy patrols between Pearce and Wolf lanes in Cedar Creek last month.

‘Papers please’

Miriam Jaimes’ husband, Miguel, was pulling into his Stony Point neighborhood in December when a deputy stopped him just blocks from his home. His vehicle’s window tint didn’t meet the legal limit, the deputy said. The deputy asked Miguel for his driver’s license which, as an undocumented immigrant, he didn’t have.

Miguel’s bad luck was compounded when the deputy discovered he had a warrant for an outstanding traffic ticket for driving without a license in 2017. The 30-year-old father and construction worker was arrested and placed under an ICE hold.

Miriam Jaimes and their three children — ages 2, 6 and 8 and all born in the United States — haven’t seen Miguel since that day.

Making ends meet without the household’s primary breadwinner has been a struggle, Miriam Jaimes said. She leans on her family to pay legal fees and holds bake sales to help pay bills. Miguel makes and mails from the detention facility keychains that she sells. Her church helps her pay for groceries.

In Jaimes’ Stony Point neighborhood, several families are missing their loved ones after they were arrested by Bastrop County deputies. The tension has changed their lives. Rarely does anyone dial 911 to report criminal activity for fear that inviting deputies into the neighborhood might lead to a deportation, she said.

“Whenever there’s something going on and the cops should be called, we’d rather not,” she said. “No one wants to be taken away from their family.”

The fear Jaimes and her neighbors feel is precisely the danger critics of the 2017 sanctuary cities ban predicted during a rancorous debate in the Legislature that led to near fisticuffs under the Capitol dome. The law requires local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration officials

“

Whenever there’s something going on and the cops should be called, we’d rather not. No one wants to be taken away from their family.

Miriam Jaimes

Bastrop resident

Police chiefs and sheriffs from the state’s metro areas opposed the bill, worried it would erode trust their officers had built within immigrant communities and push would-be witnesses and crime victims into the shadows.

Immigration attorneys and activists groups, like Grassroots Leadership in East Austin, say Cook’s policy is taking the ban’s authority too far.

Attorney Jeff Peek, whose office has seen a spike in demand from people needing legal aid after being arrested in Bastrop County, said the policy’s stated intent of curbing traffic fatalities is misdirection. Its clear purpose, he said, is to target undocumented immigrants.

“My concern, as an American, is this whole idea of ‘papers please,’” Peek said.

Cook said his department’s policy is only designed to target lawbreakers and is not aimed at any particular ethnic group.

“Where do we draw the line?” Cook said. “If you got a class of citizens that are violating the law more than others, then do we draw the line and say we can only go 30% on them?

Miriam Jaimes’ 8-year-old daughter, Mireya, cuts a drawing she made in a room in their Del Valle home that Mireya shares with her 6-years-old brother. Mireya’s father is in a detention center awaiting deportation to Mexico.

‘No humanity’

Miguel’s arrest that December day sent him down a similar path through the immigration system that Flores’ husband took. Jaimes paid an immigration attorney to represent Miguel during a bond hearing, which he lost. A DWI arrest the year before may have sealed his fate. Miguel had the option to win bond on appeal, but the effort would cost his family an additional $5,000 in legal fees and likely would fail.“It was either give my money to this lawyer and try (to appeal) or pay my rent and my bills and necessities that we have at home,” Miriam Jaimes said.

“It was either give my money to this lawyer and try (to appeal) or pay my rent and my bills and necessities that we have at home,” Miriam Jaimes said.

Now, as his wife struggles to house and feed their children, Miguel faces potential deportation to a country he hasn’t lived in since he was 14 years old.

State Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, said a traffic stop for a violation as minor as the shade of a person’s window tint should not put them on a path to deportation.

“This is the type of conduct that we have cautioned people about,” Moody said. “Because you’re talking about setting someone up for deportation because they failed to signal a lane change.”

Since Bland’s high-profile death in 2015, Moody and other lawmakers have tried to limit officers’ ability to arrest for such minor offenses.

Karina Flores, 36, serves food last month at the taco stand where she works in Elroy. Her husband was deported after a Bastrop County deputy arrested him after he rolled through a stop sign.

Moody proposed a measure in 2019 that would allow judges to dismiss a person’s Class C charges if police officers don’t provide an explanation demonstrating why they made an arrest for a fine-only charge. Rep. James White, R-Hillister, authored a bill that would have prohibited police from arresting people for offenses punishable by fine only, including many traffic offenses.

Both bills died after vigorous opposition from police unions, said Moody, vowing to resurrect the effort during the next legislative session.

For her part, Jaimes says she’s looking to move across the Bastrop County line closer to Austin. She worries about the fate of her children if she, too, inadvertently falls into the hands of Bastrop County law enforcement. The Facebook group her neighbors created to warn one another of nearby police presence is not enough to provide comfort. She’s been in the United States for 18 years and, with no remaining family across the border, she’s reluctant to return to Mexico.

Flores said she wishes she could return to Mexico, even after living in the U.S. for 12 years. But her hemophiliac children need reliable access to medical care that her home country can’t provide.

“I know that if I was to go back to Mexico, I would be condemning my child to his death,” she said.

“It feels like there is no humanity left.”

American-Statesman data reporter Dan Keemahill contributed to this report.