A Honduran couple has said a Border Patrol agent forced their 3-year-old daughter with a heart condition to choose which one of her parents would be allowed to stay with her in the U.S. and then scolded her when she began to cry. The child was at a migrant holding facility in El Paso, Texas, with her parents and two older siblings, ages 6 and 9, when she was presented with the heavy question last week, according to NPR. “And the girl, because she is more attached to me, she said, mom,” her mother, Tania, told NPR through an interpreter. “But when they started to take [my husband] away, the girl started to cry. The officer said, ‘You said [you want to go] with mom.’”

NurPhoto via Getty Images Migrants cross the Rio Bravo from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico to El Paso, Texas, to surrender to the Border Patrol on 8 May 2019.

The girl’s father, Joseph, was separated from his family and told he’d have to go back to Juárez, Mexico, which borders El Paso, to await his immigration court hearing alone. As NPR reported, the family of five had originally entered El Paso together in April but were then sent to Juárez to await their immigration proceedings. This procedure falls in line with the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program. With the help of the Catholic organization Hope Border Institute and the Catholic Diocese of El Paso, the family returned to El Paso in late June to make a claim for asylum. El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz, who has been an outspoken advocate of immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border, accompanied the family to a port of entry and asked that they be allowed to stay in the U.S., opposed to Mexico, because of the child’s health condition, which had caused a heart attack and forced her to undergo open-heart surgery, NPR reported.