The brother of a US citizen girl with a rare brain tumor who was sent to Mexico with deported parents is studying at SOTU
The older brother of an 11-year-old American citizen girl whose treatment for a rare brain tumor was interrupted when her parents were deported to Mexico will attend the State of the Union address on Tuesday.
The 18-year-old, who moved from Texas to Washington, DC, is a guest of Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-NY.
The young man will be joined by other guests from members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who want to highlight how President Donald Trump’s immigration policies have affected American families.
“This is not just about undocumented people,” said Espaillat, who also chairs the Hispanic Caucus, “this is about American citizens.”
“They’re the ones getting hurt,” Espaillat told NBC News.
The 18-year-old suspect, who is an American citizen, has been living alone in his family’s home since Feb. 4, 2025. That’s when immigration authorities removed five siblings from the United States – four of whom are US citizens, including their 11-year-old sister – and sent them to Mexico with their parents, who have no legal status.
Her family’s efforts to return to the US have reached a critical stage because the girl’s recovery is at a standstill as she cannot get the medical care she needs in Mexico. Before the State of the Union speech, this 18-year-old boy is in Congress fighting for his family to return.
“I hope that after all of this, after a long day of just talking to people, explaining my situation, I hope that, ‘Yes, let’s bring them back. Let them come back,'” he said in an interview with NBC News on Tuesday.
The young man described the loneliness he felt last year as being trapped in a box because “there are no signs there.”
“I cry when I think about it,” he remembers, keeping his siblings and his parents.
NBC News is not releasing the teenager’s name out of concern for the safety of his family members in Mexico as they are in a region known for kidnapping US citizens.
For months, the family has been eagerly waiting to hear a response from the immigration department regarding the amnesty request they filed in June, to allow the undocumented parents and one sibling to return with the girl to live in the US temporarily to help her while she receives treatment.
Espaillat said it was difficult trying to get the family back to the US. He was among the CHC members who wrote letters of support accompanying the family’s amnesty requests.
The 11-year-old girl remains “at the center of the story, no matter what happens to her,” Espaillat said.
This family’s immigration ordeal began on February 3, 2025, when Border Patrol agents detained them at a mandatory checkpoint in Texas on their way to the hospital.
Before President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, the family had successfully passed that checkpoint without a problem, according to Danny Woodward, the family’s attorney. They were to present letters from the Houston hospital and the immigration attorney, as well as the children’s birth certificates.
But the letters were not enough for this, and the family was evicted the next day.
Woodward said this is a family with no criminal record.
The Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment Monday, but the agency said parents had previously been “issued immediate removal orders,” adding that if someone “chooses to ignore them, they will face the consequences.”
As the family was sent to Mexico, the 18-year-old put aside her college aspirations and began working two jobs to pay the bills and buy life-saving medicine that she sends to her sister in Mexico every two weeks. He described working so many hours a week that sometimes he doesn’t even get to eat. As she struggles to keep up with her busy schedule, she has found one full-time job.
The 18-year-old said his younger sister needs “24/7 care” and the only people equipped to do that are his parents. For him, his family’s reunion in their Texas home means he can fulfill his dream of going to college and becoming a surgeon, the same kind of doctor who saved his sister’s life when she underwent her first brain surgery in 2024.
Espaillat first met the family in May, when he went to Monterrey in Mexico with Democratic Reps. Sylvia Garcia and Joaquin Castro from Texas.
The family’s case was one of the first to involve the arrest and removal of US citizen children, including children with serious medical conditions, as part of the deportation of their parents in the early days of Trump’s second term.
There is no official data that specifies how many US citizen children were sent away with their deported parents in the past year. But during Trump’s first four months, at least nine children of American citizens were removed from their country under these circumstances.
In another case, three US citizen children aged 7, 4 and 2 were sent to Honduras with their undocumented mother in April 2025. The 4-year-old had Stage 4 cancer.
“It’s American citizen children who have been affected and a little girl, whose treatment has been disrupted. That’s amazing,” said Espaillat. “That’s something that can have deadly consequences.”
DHS said it does not deport American children, but asks deported parents if they prefer to be removed with their American citizen children instead of being separated.
But immigration advocates say parents facing deportation risk losing custody of their U.S.-born children if there is no clear power of attorney or letter detailing who will care for the remaining children. Otherwise the children end up in the non-US foster care system, making it difficult for the parents to get custody of their children in the future.
“It’s not just a choice,” said Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project.
White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt expected that much of Trump’s State of the Union address will focus on the economy and the strength of the US military and what it is doing to respond to “remaining threats abroad.”
Trump plans to ask Democrats to go ahead and reopen the Department of Homeland Security, which was shut down earlier this month, Leavitt said. Democrats have been pushing for immigration reform before supporting a bill to fund the department.
At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and their guests talked about their experiences involving immigration enforcement.
