The undocumented 10-year-old detained by the US border patrol on the way to a Texas hospital has been released from custody to rejoin her family.



Rosa Maria Hernandez left a shelter for unaccompanied minors in San Antonio on Friday, nine days after she was taken there. After she had passed through an interior checkpoint, officers had followed her to a children’s hospital in Corpus Christi, waited outside her room and arrested her once she had recovered from a gall bladder operation.



Soon after the Democratic US representative for San Antonio, Joaquin Castro, tweeted that the Department of Health and Human Services and the contractor that runs the shelter, BCFS, “are refusing to let me meet with Rosa Maria”, she was released pending a decision on whether the deportation process against her would continue.

“While this is welcome news, Rosa Maria’s future remains uncertain,” Castro said in a statement. “The Trump administration has not made clear whether they will proceed with deportation proceedings against her … The United States should not be a place where children seeking life-sustaining medical care are at risk of apprehension.”

Rosa Maria was brought to Texas from Mexico aged three months and lives in the border city of Laredo with her family. She has cerebral palsy and the cognitive development of a six-year-old and requires specialised care, according to lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union, who filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday asking for her immediate release on the basis that her detention was unlawful and causing physical and mental trauma.

That request was was viewed with scepticism on Thursday by district judge Fred Biery, who wrote that the public interest risks being impaired “if the immigration laws are not enforced or enforced only selectively” and asked why the girl’s mother, who is also undocumented, has not been detained as well.

Biery wrote that despite the court’s “great empathy” for the girl and her mother, it would “be helpful if the government would advise the court as to why Felipa De La Cruz has not been apprehended and subject to the same deportation procedures as apparently are underway for RMH. Mother and daughter then could be successfully reunited in their home country.”

The case has underlined the difficulties that undocumented people along the US’s southern border face accessing specialist medical care, among other services. Border patrol checkpoints, placed dozens of miles from the frontier along highways that lead to interior parts of Texas, mean residents must choose to spend their lives in a narrow region or attempt long and risky journeys on foot in efforts to circumvent the inspection areas.



The limited medical facilities along the border mean that some residents forgo treatment rather than risk being arrested.

The medical vehicle transporting Rosa Maria was stopped at a checkpoint about 60 miles from Laredo in the early hours of 24 October. The border patrol has said that it is carrying out its duty to uphold immigration laws, but critics have pointed out that its policy on “sensitive locations” calls for enforcement actions to be avoided in some places, including hospitals.

Mohammad Abdollahi, an activist working for Rosa Maria’s release, said that her detention was meant to send a message that the government intends to make life as difficult as possible for undocumented people in the hope that many will chose to “self-deport” by returning to their countries of origin.

“The concern I have is, is this the new normal? I’m worried that we’re going to see more cases like Rosa’s,” said Michael Tan, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. But if Congress passes the proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (Dream) Act, he noted, Rosa Maria would have a path to legal status.

