A 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy has been detained by federal immigration authorities in Texas after she passed through a Border Patrol checkpoint on her way to a hospital to undergo emergency gall bladder surgery. 
 
 The girl, Rosamaria Hernandez, who was brought over the border illegally to live in Laredo, Tex., when she was three months old, was being transferred from a medical center in Laredo to a hospital in Corpus Christi around 2 a.m. on Tuesday when Border Patrol agents stopped the ambulance she was riding in, her family said. The agents allowed her to continue to Driscoll Children’s Hospital, the family said, but followed the ambulance the rest of the way there, then waited outside her room until she was released from the hospital. 
 
 By Wednesday evening, according to family members and advocates involved in her case, immigration agents had taken her to a facility in San Antonio where migrant children who arrive alone in the United States from Central America are usually held, even though her parents, who both lack legal status, live 150 miles away in Laredo. 
 
 Her placement there highlighted the unusual circumstances of her case: The federal government maintains detention centers for adult immigrants it plans to deport, facilities for families who arrive at the border together and shelters for children who come by themselves, known as unaccompanied minors. But it is rare, if not unheard-of, for a child already living in the United States to be arrested — particularly one with a serious medical condition. ||||| Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE A Guatemalan migrant mother and son have called an Austin, Texas church home for more than a year. They have no intentions of leaving it, due to their fear of being deported. (Feb. 23) AP 
 
 A 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who had gall bladder surgery at Driscoll Children’s Hospital is under threat of deportation after crossing a Customs and Border Protection checkpoint to get to Corpus Christi for the surgery. (Photo: Contributed) 
 
 A 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who had gall bladder surgery at Driscoll Children’s Hospital is under threat of deportation after crossing a Customs and Border Protection checkpoint to get to Corpus Christi for the surgery. 
 
 The girl’s mother, Felipa Delacruz, told the Caller-Times on Tuesday she received a call from the Mexican Consulate about her daughter, Rosamaria Hernandez. She was told her child faces deportation or could be sent to a detention center after she is released from Driscoll Children's Hospital. 
 
 Delacruz, who also lacks legal immigration status, said Tuesday federal agents are waiting outside her daughter's hospital room. Delacruz is in Laredo. 
 
 Delacruz's niece Aurora Cantu, who is a U.S. citizen, accompanied Rosamaria past the checkpoint. Delacruz said they were escorted by federal agents to Corpus Christi from there. 
 
 A 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who underwent surgery at Driscoll Children’s Hospital is under threat of deportation after crossing a U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint to get to Corpus Christi for the surgery. (Photo: Contributed) 
 
 When asked Tuesday to confirm if a federal immigration agency was on the hospital’s premises awaiting the child’s release, Driscoll Children’s Hospital spokesman Ben Castle said “that’s not something we would confirm,” citing patient confidentiality. 
 
 An Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy discourages enforcement actions at sensitive locations — including hospitals, schools, places of worship, public ceremonies or demonstrations. 
 
 The policy states such enforcement should generally be avoided and requires either prior approval from an appropriate supervisory official or exigent circumstances necessitating immediate action. 
 
 Rosamaria was scheduled to have surgery after she had complications with kidney stones, Delacruz said. 
 
 Rosamaria was first treated at Driscoll Children's Specialty Center in Laredo, where it was divulged to a nurse that the child is undocumented, Delacruz said. 
 
 Rosamaria, who was brought to the U.S. illegally by her mother when she was about 3 months old, is a recipient of state’s Special Health Care Needs Services Program, Delacruz said. The Texas Health and Human Services program helps children with special health-care needs. 
 
 This is a developing story. Check back to Caller.com for updates. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://callertim.es/2yIma38 ||||| Updated | Federal immigration agents detained an undocumented 10-year-old girl from Laredo, Texas, just out of emergency surgery on Wednesday. 
 
 Rosa Maria Hernandez, brought illegally into the United States at three months of age by her mother, was taken to Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, by her cousin. En route to the hospital, they were stopped at a Customs and Border Patrol checkpoint. Immigration agents then proceeded to follow the two to the hospital and remained there throughout the night. 
 
 Once she was discharged, Rosa Maria, who suffers from cerebral palsy, was escorted via ambulance to the Bexar County Juvenile Detention Center in San Antonio, Texas, by officers with Customs and Border Protection. 
 
 In a statement, the agency said it "is committed to enforcing the immigration laws of this nation," which include detaining undocumented immigrants. 
 
 "Due to the juvenile’s medical condition, Border Patrol agents escorted her and her cousin to a Corpus Christi hospital where she could receive appropriate medical care," the statement continued. 
 
 "Per the immigration laws of the United States, once medically cleared she will be processed accordingly," the statement concluded. 
 
 That process was expected to begin Thursday with a hearing to ultimately determine what will happen to Rosa Maria, who has brought to the United States without proper authorization by her mother when she was three months old. 
 
 Rosa Maria’s story highlights the newfound relentlessness in immigration arrests and detentions. Schools, churches, courthouses and hospitals—once “safe zones” from immigrant detention—are now open to arrests. 
 
 “This wouldn’t have happened during the [Barack] Obama administration,” one of Rosa Maria’s lawyers, Alex Galvez, told Newsweek. “This current administration wants to send a clear message to all undocumented immigrants—that if you want to go to [a] hospital, you better think twice about it because you might be deported.” 
 
 For years, Hernandez and her mother have lived in Laredo, Texas, a small city of 250,000 residents on the U.S.-Mexico border. Rosa Maria suffered from gallstones and was in need of emergency surgery. Doctors in Laredo informed her mother, Felipa De La Cruz, who is also undocumented, that the nearest children’s hospital capable of doing the operation was in Corpus Christi, a port city two and half hours away by car. 
 
 That presented a problem for De La Cruz: She would have to drive through a Border Patrol checkpoint near Freer, Texas. Instead of taking the risk of being detained and delaying her daughter’s operation, De La Cruz asked one of Rosa Maria’s cousins, Aurora Cantu, to take her instead. Rosa Maria’s doctors in Laredo gave Cantu a notarized letter to present at the checkpoint notifying the officers that she was transporting an undocumented person to receive emergency medical services. 
 
 When she arrived at the checkpoint, Border Patrol officers informed her that she was allowed to drive her cousin to the hospital, but they also told her that two agents would be driving right behind them straight to Corpus Christi. 
 
 After the operation was complete, Rosa Maria was taken to a hospital room where the two Border Patrol officers who followed them there stood waiting. That same night, Leticia Gonzalez, an immigration attorney from San Antonio, was informed about Rosa Maria’s case and rushed over to Driscoll. 
 
 By the time the lawyer arrived, there were five armed and fully uniformed Border Patrol agents waiting outside Rosa Maria's door, she said, adding that hospital staff did not allow her to go into Rosa Maria's room. She then threatened the agents and the hospital staff that she would go on one of the city’s popular Spanish radio stations and tell the public that she wasn’t allowed to see her client. The hospital and the agents obliged. 
 
 Newsweek contacted Driscoll Children’s Hospital, but officials refused to discuss the hospital’s policy regarding immigration agents on the premises. They also did not confirm Hernandez’s account due to privacy laws with respect to their patients. The hospital was embroiled in controversy in September when NPR reported that the undocumented parents of a two-month-old infant receiving treatment were detained by immigration officials upon arrival in May. 
 
 As her attorney, Gonzalez was informed by the agents that they were taking Rosa Maria to a detention center in Houston. Then, about an hour later, the agents told her that the 10-year-old would instead be taken by an ambulance to a detention center in San Antonio later Wednesday afternoon. Gonzalez petitioned the agents to allow Rosa Maria to be discharged from the custody of her grandfather, a U.S. permanent resident, who was on his way to the hospital from Laredo. They refused. 
 
 As the time approached for Rosa Maria’s removal, Gonzalez was shocked to see that an immigration officer was preparing to ride in the back of the ambulance with Rosa Maria and her cousin. Gonzalez successfully petitioned that the officer instead ride in the front. 
 
 “This 10-year-old child has cerebral palsy—she has the mental capacity closer to a 5- or 6-year old,” she said. “What good does it do to have an armed immigration officer riding with her in the back of an ambulance?” 
 
 According to Galvez, who is based in Los Angeles, California, the Department of Homeland Security will now determine whether or not it's best to allow Rosa Maria to go back home to her mother. The process usually takes longer than two months, but Galvez has been assured by Homeland Security that they will expedite the process given the circumstances. 
 
 
 
 "They told me we should expect to hear back in about two to three weeks," he said. 
 
 
 
 In the meantime, Rosa Maria will live at the Bexar County Juvenile Detention Center, where visitors are allowed to come and check up on her—only if said visitors are U.S. citizens. 
 
 
 
 "As we were taking out of the hospital, [Rosa Maria] looked visibly shaken," Gonzalez said. "The only thing this child wants is her mom." 
 
 
 
 For her part, De La Cruz is glad is doing well—Hernandez told Newsweek that Rosa Maria was released in stable condition—but worries about what awaits her at Bexar. 
 
 
 
 "I've always been at her side, and now that she needs me I'm not," she told Telemundo on Wednesday. "I have no idea how they're going to treat her. I'm scared." 
 
 Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified which Homeland Security agency was involved in the case. It was the Customs and Border Protection, not Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The story was also updated to include a comment from Customs and Border Protection on Thursday afternoon. Also, an earlier version misidentified the name of Rosa Maria's lawyer. Her name is Leticia Gonzalez. ||||| U.S. immigration authorities arrested hundreds of undocumented immigrants in at least a half-dozen states this week in a series of raids that marked the first large-scale enforcement of President Trump’s Jan. 25 order to crack down on the estimated 11 million immigrants living here illegally. 
 
 Officials said the raids targeted known criminals, but they also netted some immigrants without criminal records, an apparent departure from similar enforcement waves during the Obama administration. Last month, Trump substantially broadened the scope of who the Department of Homeland Security can target to include those with minor offenses or no convictions at all. 
 
 Trump has pledged to deport as many as 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records. 
 
 Immigration officials confirmed that agents this week raided homes and workplaces in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, the Los Angeles area, North Carolina and South Carolina, netting hundreds of people. But Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said they were part of “routine” immigration enforcement actions. ICE dislikes the term “raids,” and prefers to say authorities are conducting “targeted enforcement actions,” she said. 
 
 (The Washington Post) 
 
 Christensen said the raids, which began Monday and ended Friday at noon, found undocumented immigrants from a dozen Latin American countries. “We’re talking about people who are threats to public safety or a threat to the integrity of the immigration system,” she said, noting that the majority of those detained were serious criminals, including some who were convicted of murder and domestic violence. 
 
 [For years, immigration authorities gave this Arizona mother a pass. Now she has been deported.] 
 
 Immigration activists said the crackdown went beyond the six states DHS identified, and said they had also documented ICE raids of unusual intensity during the past two days in Florida, Kansas, Texas and Northern Virginia. 
 
 That undocumented immigrants with no criminal records were arrested and could potentially be deported sent a shock wave through immigrant communities nationwide amid concerns that the U.S. government could start going after law-abiding people. 
 
 “This is clearly the first wave of attacks under the Trump administration, and we know this isn’t going to be the only one,” Cristina Jimenez, executive director of United We Dream, an immigrant youth organization, said Friday during a conference call with immigration advocates. 
 
 ICE agents in the Los Angeles area Thursday took a number of individuals into custody over the course of an hour, seizing them from their homes and on their way to work, activists said. 
 
 David Marin, ICE’s field director in the Los Angeles area, said in a conference call with reporters Friday that 75 percent of the approximately 160 people detained in the operation this week had felony convictions; the rest had misdemeanors or were in the United States illegally. Officials said Friday night that 37 of those detained in Los Angeles had been deported to Mexico. 
 
 “Dangerous criminals who should be deported are being released into our communities,” Marin said. 
 
 Spanish language radio stations and the local NPR affiliate in Los Angeles have been running public service announcements regarding the hourly “Know Your Rights” seminars the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles scheduled for Friday and Saturday. By the time the 4 p.m. group began Friday, more than 100 others had gathered at the group’s office in the Westlake neighborhood just outside downtown. 
 
 A video that circulated on social media Friday appeared to show ICE agents in Texas detaining people in an Austin shopping center parking lot. Immigration advocates also reported roadway checkpoints, where ICE appeared to be targeting immigrants for random ID checks, in North Carolina and in Austin. ICE officials denied that authorities used checkpoints during the operations. 
 
 [The ‘sanctuary city’ on the front line of the fight over Trump’s immigration policy] 
 
 “I’m getting lots of reports from my constituents about seeing ICE on the streets. Teachers in my district have contacted me — certain students didn’t come to school today because they’re afraid,” said Greg Casar, an Austin City Council member. “I talked to a constituent, a single mother, who had her door knocked on this morning by ICE.” 
 
 Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) said he confirmed with ICE’s San Antonio office that the agency “has launched a targeted operation in South and Central Texas as part of Operation Cross Check.” 
 
 “I am asking ICE to clarify whether these individuals are in fact dangerous, violent threats to our communities, and not people who are here peacefully raising families and contributing to our state,” Castro said in a statement Friday night. 
 
 Hiba Ghalib, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta, said the ICE detentions were causing “mass confusion” in the immigrant community. She said she had heard reports of ICE agents going door-to-door in one largely Hispanic neighborhood, asking people to present their papers. 
 
 “People are panicking,” Ghalib said. “People are really, really scared.” 
 
 Immigration officials acknowledged that as a result of Trump’s executive order, authorities had cast a wider net than they would have last year. 
 
 The Trump administration is facing several legal challenges to his executive orders on immigration. On Thursday, the administration lost a court battle over a separate executive order to temporarily ban entry into the United States by citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries, as well as by refugees. The administration said Friday that it is considering raising the case to the Supreme Court. 
 
 [Federal appeals court rules 3 to 0 against Trump on travel ban] 
 
 Some activists in Austin and Los Angeles suggested that the raids might be retaliation for those cities’ “sanctuary city” policies. A government aide familiar with the raids said it is possible that the predominantly daytime operations — a departure from the Obama administration’s night raids — meant to “send a message to the community that the Trump deportation force is in effect.” 
 
 Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy group, said that the wave of detentions harks back to the George W. Bush administration, when workplace raids to sweep up all undocumented workers were common. 
 
 The Obama administration conducted a spate of raids and also pursued a more aggressive deportation policy than any previous president, sending more than 400,000 people back to their birth countries at the height of his deportations in 2012. The public outcry over the lengthy detentions and deportations of women, children and people with minor offenses led President Obama in his second term to prioritize convicted criminals for deportation. 
 
 A DHS official confirmed that while immigration agents were targeting criminals, given the broader range defined by Trump’s executive order, they also were sweeping up noncriminals in the vicinity who were found to be lacking documentation. It was unclear how many of the people detained would have been excluded under Obama’s policy. 
 
 Federal immigration officials, as well as activists, said that the majority of those detained were adult men, and that no children were taken into custody. 
 
 “Big cities tend to have a lot of illegal immigrants,” said one immigration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly because of the sensitive nature of the operation. “They’re going to a target-rich environment.” 
 
 Immigrant rights groups said that they were planning protests in response to the raids, including one Friday evening in Federal Plaza in New York City and a vigil in Los Angeles. 
 
 “We cannot understate the level of panic and terror that is running through many immigrant communities,” said Walter Barrientos of Make the Road New York in New York City, who spoke on a conference call with immigration advocates. 
 
 “We’re trying to make sure that families who have been impacted are getting legal services as quickly as possible. We’re trying to do some legal triage,” said Bob Libal, the executive director of Grassroots Leadership, which provides assistance and advocacy work to immigrants in Austin. “It’s chaotic,” he said. The organization’s hotline, he said, had been overwhelmed with calls. 
 
 Jeanette Vizguerra, 35, a Mexican house cleaner whose permit to stay in the country expired this week, said Friday during the conference call that she was newly apprehensive about her scheduled meeting with ICE next week. 
 
 Fearing deportation, Vizguerra, a Denver mother of four — including three who are U.S. citizens — said through an interpreter that she had called on activists and supporters to accompany her to the meeting. 
 
 “I know I need to mobilize my community, but I know my freedom is at risk here,” Vizguerra said. 
 
 Janell Ross in Los Angeles and Camille Pendley in Atlanta contributed to this report.
– An ICE "sensitive locations" directive says federal agents shouldn't try to enforce the law at such locations except under "exigent circumstances." But the family of Rosamaria Hernandez, a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who had gallbladder surgery at a hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, says ICE agents stalked her at the hospital, then took her to a San Antonio detention center for migrant kids—all while her parents, also illegal immigrants, are at their home in Laredo 150 miles away. Arresting a minor already living in the US, especially one with a medical issue, is a move the New York Times is calling "rare, if not unheard-of." It's also one that's prompted Rep. Joaquin Castro to issue a challenge to President Trump and Elaine Duke, the acting secretary of Homeland Security. "Show that this enforcement operation is prioritizing a dangerous criminal," Castro says in a statement. This all started when Rosamaria—brought to the US from Mexico as an infant by her parents, who hoped to get better treatment for her cerebral palsy—was rushed by ambulance from a Laredo medical center to Driscoll Children's Hospital for the emergency procedure. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times notes Rosamaria was with her cousin, a US citizen. The trip Tuesday meant the ambulance passed a Border Patrol checkpoint, and while agents let the ambulance go, they followed it, her family says. ICE agents hovered outside Rosamaria's room until she was released, then took her to the San Antonio detention center, Leticia Hernandez, an attorney for the family, tells Newsweek. Now, while Rosamaria's family and lawyers vie for her release from the center, only US citizens can visit her, per Newsweek. "The only thing this child wants is her mom," Hernandez says.