New Texas mom deported after missing immigration hearing after C-section, family says

A Texas mother says she was unfairly deported to Mexico and forced to leave the U.S. with her four children after she missed an immigration court hearing after giving birth to premature twins by emergency C-section.

Babies Ashley and Allison, both U.S. citizens born in Houston, have been suffering from pneumonia and bronchitis since arriving in Mexico, Salazar-Hinojosa told Notícias in Spanish. Often requiring an oxygen mask to breathe.

“It feels terrible to see my daughter sick, I feel depressed,” she said.

According to the family, the series of events began on September 13, when the twins were born 35 weeks prematurely.

“I had to have an emergency C-section. My baby was born prematurely. I was very sick because of the bleeding,” Salazar-Hinojosa said.

Salazar-Hinojosa’s husband, Federico Arellano, called a phone number provided to the family by immigration authorities, according to an affidavit Arellano shared with NBC News. They were informed of the situation as the mother was scheduled to appear in court on October 9th.

Arellano said in the affidavit that the family was told by phone that the immigration hearing would be rescheduled.

At a news conference on Monday, Arellano told reporters in Houston that his wife missed the Oct. 9 hearing because doctors told her to recover at home.

Arellano, 24, and Salazar Hinojosa, 23, have been married since 2019. In addition to twins Ashley and Alison, the couple also has a two-year-old son, Federico, who was born in Mexico. Arellano is also the stepfather to his wife’s 7-year-old daughter, Yitzel, who was also born in Mexico.

On Dec. 6, the family received a call from immigration authorities and was told to report to an office in Greens Point, Texas, four days later to discuss Salazar-Hinojo, according to Arellano’s testimony. Sa case.

Salazar-Hinojosa said she arrived at the appointment with her husband and four children thinking it would be like any other routine appointment she had had before.

Immigration authorities arrested Salazar-Hinojosa and sent her and her four children to Mexico, according to the family’s attorney, Isaias Torres. Arellano’s affidavit also states that when he asked immigration authorities to allow him to keep the twins, they responded: “‘No,’ because the babies were too young and should stay with their mother.”

“We brought nothing, no clothes, no diapers, nothing,” Salazar Hinojosa told Izvestia. “They wouldn’t let me call my family, they took my phone and took it away from me.”

Arellano tried to intervene on behalf of his family. According to Salazar-Hinojosa, her husband begged immigration authorities not to take his family away from him.

“He wanted to see if we could get a lawyer to come and see what we could do, but they refused and they have to take us away now,” Salazar-Hinojosa said, adding that immigration authorities then insisted She signs deportation papers.

“They said if I didn’t sign the deportation form or something like that, they were going to arrest my husband and fine him,” Salazar-Hinojosa said, adding that she feared if she didn’t sign , they would arrest her husband; “They forced me.”

When the family realized they couldn’t prevent Salazar-Hinojosa’s deportation on such short notice, the mother felt she had no choice but not to keep her child, she told Noticias Telemundo Worried that her husband would have difficulty balancing work and childcare on his own.

Immigration officials confirmed to NBC News on Wednesday that they had deported Salazar-Hinojosa from Texas.

While some media reports said the mother, twins and two other children had been deported, Immigration and Customs Enforcement told NBC News it was only officially deporting Salazar-Hinojosa.

“ICE does not deport U.S. citizens. Any decision for a U.S. citizen minor to leave the United States with his or her parents rests with the parents,” an ICE spokesperson said.

ICE charged Salazar-Hinojosa with illegally entering the United States on June 28 through the Rio Grande Valley area of ​​Texas. She was released on June 29 under the alternatives to detention program to await immigration proceedings, the spokesman said.

Salazar-Hinojosa failed to attend an Oct. 9 hearing and was ordered deported by a judge in the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, the spokesman said. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Torres told WOAI, “This case should not have gone to such an extreme. There were many options, legal options available, but he was not given that opportunity.”

Silvia Mintz, another attorney for Arellano and her family, told Newsday she believed “ICE officers abused their discretion because Cristina is not a criminal and the child They were newborns, which could have been resolved through a motion to reopen the case.

Mintz and Torres told KHOU Arellano tried to explain, but ICE agents stopped him.

“They were shocked and surprised to be separated,” Torres said.

Attorneys said they plan to file a complaint with the Office of the Inspector General and submit immigration petitions to see if Salazar-Hinojosa and her children can be paroled and returned to the United States. This process can take several months.

President Joe Biden has come under criticism from Republicans who say his policies leave the border open to illegal immigrants. But in June, the Migration Policy Institute reported that Biden’s deportations were expected to exceed those of Donald Trump’s first administration.

Trump was elected in November after vowing to pursue the largest mass deportations in U.S. history. His pick to head ICE, Tim Homan, said that under Trump’s plan, the only way not to separate families is to “send them all back.”

People born in the United States (except for the children of certain foreign diplomats) are constitutionally guaranteed U.S. citizenship regardless of whether their parents are here illegally. Trump recently said in an exclusive interview on “Meet the Press” that he wants to end the guarantee.

In a 2021 report, the Government Accountability Office found that over roughly five years, ICE arrested 674 people, detained 121 people, and deported 70 people who the GAO said may have been U.S. citizens. The GAO found that ICE did not retain sufficient data on deportations of U.S. citizens at the time.

This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com