A 6 -year -old Honduran child with leukemia whose arrest caused a public protest after he, his mother and sister were seized by ice agents and sent to a Texas detention center. He is back in Los Angeles, said one of the family’s lawyers on Friday.
The family, which had been held for a month at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, was released Wednesday by the application of immigration and customs after a lawsuit was filed in its name in the Federal Court of San Antonio.
“We were in the process of assembling a brief response explaining why the Government was wrong to hold them when we knew they were being released,” News Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic of the Faculty of Law of Columbia, told NBC. “ICE released the family without a court order.”
The family was sent from the detention center to a shelter in southern Texas, Mukherjee said.
“From there, today they put themselves on a plane and flew to Lax, where they met their family in Los Angeles,” Mukherjee said.
Mukherjee said “public pressure” about the difficult situation of this family and the coverage of the media “helped free this family.”
Its launch “demonstrates the power we have when we fight against harmful and non -American policies”, lawyer Kate Gibson Kumar of the Texas Civil Rights Project, He also represented the family, he said on the Facebook page of the group.
“The practice of court arrests is a shameless contempt for those who legally seek security through government processes themselves, and even greater contempt for our Constitution and the protections it provides, including due process,” Gibson Kumar wrote.
NBC News has communicated with the Department of National Security to comment and an explanation of whether the agency will continue trying to deport that family to Honduras.
The organization of Gibson Kumar and the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Columbia University sued ICE seeking to win the family liberation after they were seized after their asylum audience on May 29 in Los Angeles. The mother had received instructions to take her children, who are out of school, to the audience, said Gibson Kumar last week.
“They arrested the family in the hall when they left,” said Gibson Kumar. “The children were really scared. They were crying.”
While he was detained, the 6 -year -old boy, identified as NMZ in a habeas corpus complaint, a medical appointment of June 5 was also lost, according to a presentation of the court.
DHS had repeatedly insisted that the child was examined several times while he and his family were locked up. In a publication about X, DHS called the accusations of medical negligence “false news.”
“Ice always prioritizes the health, safety and well -being of all detainees under their care,” said DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin last week.
The boy still lived in Honduras When it was diagnosed at 3 years with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a type of blood cancer that can progress quickly but is considered curable in most children.
Mukherjee told NBC News before when he visited the family in the center, the 6 -year -old exhibited some conditions that are known symptoms of his cancer.
“It has easy bruises,” said Mukherjee. “His right leg had many white and blue brands, his left leg had black and blue marks, he had white and blue marks in his arms. He has bone pain occasionally. He has lost his appetite. All these are quite consecutive of things.”
The family entered the US.
The family declared that Honduras had fled after being subject to “imminent and threatening death threats,” according to habeas corpus.
The United States government determined that they were not a risk of escape and not a danger to the community and that the mother did not put himself in an electronic monitor.
DHS gave the family that appeared at the Court hearing on May 29 to pursue his claims for humanitarian relief, Mukherjee said.
Meanwhile, according to their lawyers, the family established roots in Los Angeles and the children enrolled in the public school and learned English. The Church also attended every Sunday.
But after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, his administration ordered the judges to dismiss the cases of immigrants who have been in the country for less than two years, so ICE could deport them more quickly.
After the judge abruptly dismissed the Family asylum application, ice agents were waiting for them in the hall when the mother and their children left the courtroom.
