The family of a four-year-old girl who is receiving life-saving treatment in the United States are fighting against deportation, as her medical team warns she will likely die “within days” if forced to return to Mexico.
Deysi Vargas, her husband and their daughter – whom lawyers identified by the pseudonym Sofia – came to the US in 2023, receiving permission to enter the US on humanitarian grounds to seek medical care. Sofia suffers from short bowel syndrome, requiring specialized care that includes IV treatments for 14 hours a day. She has seen significant improvement since arriving in the US and obtaining care at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, her mother said.
But in April, Donald Trump’s administration terminated the family’s legal status and ordered them to self-deport, which would have grave consequences for Sofia.
“Sofia’s doctors have been clear she will die within days,” Gina Amato, the directing attorney of Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, which is representing the family. “Deporting this family under these conditions is not only unlawful – it constitutes a moral failure that violates the basic tents of humanity and decency.”
Bring us some more individual immigration cases that are ongoing with which you disagree with the deportation. By the end of the year, we may have a handful.
Over a hundred thousand removals have occurred since Trump took office. Is it any wonder that someone could find a handful where the sentiment would be that a deportation doesn’t seem fair? Most likely the final story isn’t told on some of these cases he is bringing us.
The overall point of these anecdotes? Yawn.
Oskar Schindler: Power - is when we have every justification to kill, and we don’t.
Amon Goeth: You think that’s power?
Oskar Schindler: That’s what the Emperor said. A man stole something, he’s brought in before the Emperor, he throws himself down on the ground. He begs for mercy, he knows he’s going to die. And the Emperor - pardons him. This worthless man, he lets him go.
Amon Goeth: I think you are drunk.
Oskar Schindler: That’s power, Amon. That - is power.
I don’t speak for ‘my side’, but I am happy to have criminal illegals deported.
I strongly disagree with them being thrown in prison without charges and trials and convictions.
I strongly disagree with deporting students for expressing benign opinions like ‘Tufts should divest from Israel’, and strongly disagree with locking up students thousands of miles from their university without trials.
I am glad to see anyone expressing antisemitic views or threats deported.
I strongly disagree with sending letters to people here legally for things like this medical care telling them to self deport.
Even deporting more than 17,200 people in a single month does not put President Donald Trump on track to make good on his Inauguration Day promise to deport “millions and millions.” In fact, 17,200 deportations per month is less than half the pace it would take to reach the record number of 430,000 deportations in a single year, set under former President Barack Obama in 2013.
But the pressure the Trump administration has been putting on ICE for arrests and deportations and ICE’s nationwide arrest operations do appear to be yielding results.
In February and March, the first two full months of the Trump administration, ICE had actually deported fewer people than it had during the same months during the Biden administration, in part because fewer people have been trying to cross the border as a result of Trump’s policy changes. It is easier to deport people when they are arrested at the border than to find them at large in the United States. But ICE’s efforts to increase deportations have made up for the smaller number of people being detained at the border.
Turn aways at the border aren’t remotely the same as internal deportations. Under Trump, turn aways at the border are almost nonexistent, because illegal crossing attempts have been dramatically reduced.
