To anyone delusional enough to think Trump/MAGA fascism wouldn’t deliberately torment little children… wouldn’t be so heartless as to deny medical treatment to a kid suffering from a painful and often fatal condition… wouldn’t deport a U.S. citizen and send her to a possible death… wouldn’t tear apart a family struggling to stay together—think again.
On March 13 the Houston Chronicle reported that federal authorities had deported to Mexico a 10-year-old girl with brain cancer. Over a month went by before any word of this atrocity became public. Most of the details of the arrest, and the condition of the girl and her family, remain unknown.
But it has been reported that the girl was with her parents and several siblings, driving hundreds of miles from their home in the Rio Grande Valley to Houston, where she was receiving medical treatment and had previously had a cancerous brain tumor removed. The family had made this trip several times over the past year, according to the Chronicle.
Their car was stopped at one of the immigration checkpoints in the largely barren and uninhabited area between the border and cities like Corpus Christi and San Antonio. On previous trips through this heavily policed zone, the girl’s parents presented letters from her doctors, which enabled them to get past the checkpoints.
But their drive north in early February came just a couple of weeks after the fascist Donald Trump became president. Racist slander of immigrants and all Mexican people, vicious threats of unprecedented repression and massive deportations, bloodthirsty MAGA-mobs howling their approval of Trump’s hate and lies, were all cornerstones of Trump and Vance’s campaign.
And on this trip, authorities at the checkpoint told them the girl’s parents that their “paperwork was not sufficient” to allow them to travel to Houston. The entire family was taken into custody. Neither parent had a criminal record, according to the Civil Rights Project, a group dealing with border and immigration issues. But these border pigs told the parents that “their children could stay in the United States and in government custody, or they could go to Mexico with their parents.”
The girl’s mother told NBC News that the family was taken to a “detention center” (prison) on the U.S. side of the border, where she and her daughters were separated from her husband and sons. Within a few hours, Customs and Border Patrol agents “loaded the family into a van and dropped them in Mexico.”
The girl with brain cancer and one of her siblings, who has a serious heart disorder, are now unable to get with their regular doctors. A statement by their mother reads, “I want my children to be able to access the medical care they need, to attend their schools, and live their lives in the only country they know as home. They are American citizens; it is their right. But it is also their right to be raised by their parents in that home.”
“Families can be deported together”
–Tom Homan, Trump’s “Border Czar”
Beginning before he actually took office, Trump and his fascist cohort started making preparations for massive deportations of immigrants, and of U.S. citizens like this girl and her siblings. Trump has unleashed a torrent of executive orders targeting immigrants. Among other things, these orders lay the groundwork for mass detentions and deportations on an unprecedented scale; criminalize refugees from dangerous or repressive countries; enable deployment of the U.S. military directly against unarmed men, women and children seeking refuge and a chance to live. (See the Revolution article “Trump’s Onslaught of Brutal Orders Signals All-Out War on Immigrants and Immigration” for a fuller exposure and analysis of the MAGA fascist war on immigrants.)
Thousands of people have been hauled in by ICE and deported since Trump became president. Raids are occurring with increasing intensity throughout the country. Preparations are well underway for arresting and deporting tens of thousands, perhaps millions more. People who go to work in the morning are not coming home at night and are disappearing from their homes and neighborhoods. Concentration camps for immigrants are being prepared and built along the border.
The recent outpourings of protest against the vilification of and attacks on immigrants by the Trump/MAGA fascist regime were inspiring and important. But much more of that is needed, urgently—protests so powerful they prevent this fascism from fully consolidating. It must be accomplished before this fascism consolidates and takes its wholesale persecution of immigrants to new depths of atrocity, as part of its imposition of all-round fascism.