THEY DEPORTED A CHILD WITH BRAIN CANCER - AND FUCK LITERALLY ANYONE WHO TRIES TO *RATIONALIZE* THIS

While America lectures the world on human rights, a ten-year-old citizen fighting cancer was ripped from her doctors and dumped in Mexico.

I WAS SCROLLING THROUGH NEWS YESTERDAY when I came across a story that made me stop cold, take a breath, re-read it, and then just sit there, staring at my screen, thinking: *This* is what we’ve chosen to be?

A ten-year-old with brain cancer — who was receiving life-saving treatment — was kicked out of the land of the free and quite literally dumped in Mexico.

Yes, you read it correctly.

A child.
With brain cancer.

And for those whose moral compass only activates when citizenship papers are involved: SHE IS A U.S. CITIZEN.

This ten-year-old girl recovering from brain cancer was removed with her undocumented parents last month

Yet before I go, I need to pause here — because the fact that I even have to mention her citizenship status to prove her worth to some readers reveals something beyond grotesque about our collective values. Since when did a piece of paper determine whether a sick child deserves medical care? Since when did arbitrary borders drawn by colonizers determine whose suffering matters?

So why was this child expelled from the country where she was receiving critical treatment? Because her parents lack a different piece of paper. They’re “undocumented” — an inhumane clinical term that somehow justifies separating a sick child from her doctors.

Just like virtually every non-Indigenous person who showed up on this continent at some point in history, they came here seeking a better life. And the hateful hypocrisy is sickening — watching the descendants of immigrants, many whose ancestors arrived without papers, proper authorization, or any legal right whatsoever, now deciding which families deserve humanity.

This ten-year-old girl was literally on her way to an emergency medical checkup in Houston when ICE detained the family at a checkpoint. The parents had made this exact trip at least five times before, showing letters from doctors explaining the situation. Previously, they’d been allowed through. But suddenly, in February 2025, that wasn’t good enough anymore.

So instead of getting to her doctors, this ten-year-old ended up on the floor of a detention center, under harsh fluorescent lights — her mother describing the fear as “horrible” and “frustrating”, repulsed by this inhumanity as she watched her precious, sick daughter lying on the cold floor.

Hours later, the family was literally dumped on the Mexico side of a Texas bridge, abandoned to fend for themselves.

No, this is not hyperbole. And yes, the absolute fuckery of it all takes my breath away.

Again, let’s be painfully honest here: This didn’t happen by accident. It is literally the system working exactly as designed. As Tom Homan, the border czar, plainly stated: “families can be deported together” regardless of status.

Translation: We don’t give a fuck if your kids are citizens. We don’t care if your child needs medical treatment to stay alive. Your brown skin and lack of papers trump everything else.

I keep thinking about what this girl must be feeling — what her family must be feeling. She still struggles with speech and mobility on the right side of her body. She needs medication to prevent convulsions. She needs regular check-ups with specialists to monitor her recovery.

And now she’s now in Mexico, in a place her mother describes as so dangerous they “can’t sleep at night”. Think about that for a second. A child who survived brain cancer, who needs ongoing medical care to live, who struggles with speech and mobility, who needs medication to prevent convulsions — is lying awake at night in fear, in a place where she can’t get treatment, can’t go to school, can’t even feel safe enough to sleep.

And her country — THIS country — put her there. Deliberately.

And let’s also be crystal clear about why this region is so dangerous . . .

It’s dangerous because it’s controlled by cartels that exist primarily to serve American demand for drugs. The brutal irony is staggering: American policies have helped create and sustain the very violence they’re supposedly protecting themselves from at the border.

Oh, and she’s not the only sick kid in the family. Her 15-year-old brother has a heart condition that could kill him without proper monitoring. He wears a heart monitor that tracks his heartbeat. He’s not getting care either.

As their mother said through tears: “The authorities have my children’s lives in their hands.”

And they don’t care.
They don’t fucking care.

This country that will move heaven and earth to rescue a billionaire’s submersible can’t be bothered to ensure a child with brain cancer gets her medication.

The Texas Civil Rights Project blurred the photograph for safety purposes.

The truth is, we’re witnessing the culmination of a deliberate political strategy that has now dropped any pretense of decency. This administration isn’t even bothering with the polite euphemisms anymore. They’re just saying the quiet part out loud: Certain lives matter less. Brown lives. Immigrant lives. Poor lives.

This girl’s parents have lived in America since 2013. They’ve worked multiple jobs to support their family. They have no criminal history. What possible threat do they pose? As opposed to billionaires stealing our social security for example.

But logic isn’t the point. Cruelty is.

Because cruelty rallies the base.
Cruelty wins votes.
Cruelty makes certain Americans feel like something is being done to address their entirely manufactured fears.

And the sickest part? This isn’t just a Republican problem. Where’s the Democratic outrage? Where are the elected officials of the supposedly compassionate party staging sit-ins at detention centers? Where are the emergency bills to stop this madness?

They’re nowhere to be found because, and a thousand percent complicit in the same system. They might theatrically tsk-tsk as they wave their fingers and issue strongly worded statements, but they won’t fundamentally challenge the dehumanization at the core of American immigration policy.

Look, I can already hear the keyboards clacking as some readers formulate their rebuttals: “But there have to be laws!” — “Their parents broke the law!” — and the always-compassionate “We can’t just let everyone in!”

Okay Todd, you keep convincing yourself that enforcing an arbitrary line on a map is more important than a child’s heartbeat.

But mate, you can leave it the fuck out of my comments section. I’m not interested in debating whether a ten-year-old American citizen with brain cancer should be able to access medical care in her own country. That’s not a debate. If your moral framework leads you to justify this, the problem isn’t with the immigration system — it’s with you and your fucking racism.

And for the *America First* crowd who will inevitably respond with the ol’ “But they have no right to be here, they’re making things harder for us, they’re taking what’s ours” — I have a question: Do you hear the profound irony in what you’re saying? You’re on stolen land claiming others don’t belong here.

If we’re really going to play this *who belongs here* game, then none of us — except the Indigenous — have any more *right* to be on this land whether your family arrived three weeks ago or three centuries ago. What’s the fundamental difference between today’s undocumented immigrants and the undocumented Europeans who first settled here without permission? Oh right — the latter committed genocide along the way.

And this story is just one small piece of a much larger pattern. While we’re deporting sick children to Mexico, we’re also funding the mass killing of Palestinian children. We’re turning a blind eye to the slaughter in the Congo. We’re ensuring through our foreign policy and economic imperialism that people in the Global South remain desperate enough to risk everything to come here — only to treat them like criminals when they arrive.

I don’t have easy, comfortable solutions that won’t disrupt your life. Because real solutions require sacrifice and solidarity. They require us to protect immigrants by any means necessary. To keep quiet when ICE comes knocking. To organize, donate, and put our bodies on the line when needed. To stop making ourselves the victims when we’re not the ones being deported or detained.

The mother of this deported child said something that keeps echoing in my mind: “I don’t wish anyone to go through this situation.”

Even after everything that’s been done to her family, this woman — whose child might die because of our policies — still has more humanity in her exhausted sigh than exists in the entire apparatus of the American immigration system. More compassion in her tear-stained face than in the politicians who designed this cruelty. More grace in her broken heart than in the voters who cheered for it. And infinitely more courage than those of us who read these stories and look away, convincing ourselves there’s nothing we can do.

This is the United States of America we’ve built: One where the victims of our cruelty have to teach us what compassion looks like.

And if that doesn’t make you furious, I seriously don’t know what will.

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