A Texas mother says she was unfairly deported to Mexico and forced to depart the U.S. with her four children after missing an immigration court hearing because she was recovering from delivering premature newborn twins by emergency C-section.
Infants Ashley and Allison, both of whom are U.S. citizens born in Houston, have been enduring pneumonia and bronchitis, often needing oxygen masks to breathe, since arriving to Mexico, Salazar-Hinojosa told Noticias Telemundo in Spanish.
“I feel bad, I feel devastated to see my daughters sick,” she said.
According to the family, the chain of events started on Sept. 13, when the twins were born 35 weeks premature.
“I had to have an emergency C-section. My babies were born prematurely. I was very ill because of my hemorrhage,” Salazar-Hinojosa said.
Salazar-Hinojosa’s husband, Federico Arellano, called a phone number given to the family by immigration services to inform them of the situation because the mother was scheduled to appear in immigration court on Oct. 9, according to an affidavit from Arellano shared with NBC News Thursday night.
The family was told on the phone that the immigration hearing would be rescheduled, Arellano stated in his affidavit.
During a press conference Monday, Arellano told reporters in Houston his wife missed the Oct. 9 hearing because she was told by doctors to recover at home.
Arellano, 24, and Salazar-Hinojosa, 23, have been married since 2019. Arellano is a U.S. citizen born in Houston and Salazar-Hinojosa is a Mexican national. In addition to twins Ashley and Allison, the couple also share a 2-year-old son, Federico, born in Mexico. Arellano is also a stepfather to his wife’s 7-year-old daughter, Yitzel, also born in Mexico.
Federico Arellano and Cristina Geraldyn Salazar-Hinojosa.
On Dec. 6, the family received a phone call from immigration authorities and they were told to report to an office in Greenspoint, Texas, four days later to discuss Salazar-Hinojosa’s case, according to Arellano’s affidavit.
Salazar-Hinojosa said she arrived at the appointment with her husband and four children thinking it would be like any other of her previous routine appointments.
Instead, immigration authorities arrested Salazar-Hinojosa, and she and her four children were sent to Mexico, according to the family’s attorney Isaias Torres. Arellano’s affidavit also states that when he asked immigration authorities to let him keep the twins, they responded, “‘NO’ that the babies were too young and should stay with their mother.”
“We didn’t have anything with us, no clothes, no diapers, nothing. We didn’t have anything with us,” Salazar-Hinojosa told Noticias Telemundo. “They didn’t let me make any calls to my family, they took my phone away from me, they snatched it out of my hands.”
Arellano tried to intervene on behalf of his family. According to Salazar-Hinojosa, her husband begged immigration authorities to please not take his family away from him.
“He wanted to see if we could get a lawyer to see what we could do, and they said no, that they had to take us now,” Salazar-Hinojosa said. She added that immigration authorities then insisted she sign the paperwork for her deportation.
“They said that if I didn’t sign the deportation forms and all that, they were going to arrest my husband and fine him,” Salazar-Hinojosa said, adding that she was afraid they would arrest her husband if she didn’t sign; “they forced me.”
After the family realized they could not stop Salazar-Hinojosa’s deportation on such short notice, the mother felt she had no other choice but not keep her children with her, telling Noticias Telemundo she worried that her husband would struggle balancing work and childcare on his own.
Federico Arellano with his children.
Immigration officials confirmed to NBC News on Wednesday that they had deported Salazar-Hinojosa from Texas.
While some media outlets reported that the mother, the twins and the two other children had been deported, Immigration and Customs Enforcement told NBC News that it had only formally deported Salazar-Hinojosa.
“ICE does not deport U.S. citizens. Any decision for minors with U.S. citizenship to depart the U.S. with their parents is up to the parents,” an ICE spokesperson said.
ICE alleged Salazar-Hinojosa entered the U.S. illegally on June 28 through the Rio Grande Valley area in Texas. The spokesperson said she was released June 29 under the Alternatives to Detention program, pending her immigration proceedings.
The spokesperson said Salazar-Hinojosa failed to show up to the Oct. 9 hearing and was ordered removed by a judge with the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.
Torres told WOAI that “this case shouldn’t have gone to this extreme. There were options, legal options that were available and he was not given that opportunity.”
A second attorney representing Arellano and his family, Silvia Mintz, told Noticias Telemundo she believes “ICE officers abused their discretion, because Cristina is not a criminal, the children are newborns, and this could have been resolved with a motion to reopen the case.”
Both Mintz and Torres told KHOU Arellano tried to explain, but ICE agents prevented him.
“They were shocked and surprised that they were separated,” Torres said.
Cristina Geraldyn Salazar-Hinojosa with her children.
The attorneys have said they plan to file a complaint with the Office of Inspector General as well as immigration petitions to see if Salazar-Hinojosa and her children can return to the U.S. under parole. That process could take several months.
President Joe Biden has been criticized by Republicans who have said his policies have left the border open to illegal immigration. But in June, the Migration Policy Institute reported that Biden’s deportations were on track to surpass those of Donald Trump‘s first administration.
Trump was elected in November after vowing to conduct the largest mass deportation operation in American history. His pick to head ICE, Tim Homan, has said that the only way to not break up families under Trump’s plan is to “send them all back.”
People born in the United States — with the exception of children of certain foreign diplomats — are constitutionally guaranteed U.S. citizenship regardless of whether their parents are illegally here. Trump recently said in a “Meet the Press” exclusive interview that he wants to end that guarantee.
In a 2021 report, the Government Accountability Office found that over about five years, ICE arrested 674, detained 121 and removed 70 people that the GAO said were potentially U.S. citizens. The GAO found ICE did not keep sufficient data on U.S. citizen deportations at the time.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
