ICE Deported a Baby to Mexico Hours After He Was Hospitalized

Less than 48 hours after a two-month-old baby detained at Dilley Immigration Processing Center had to be hospitalized for serious respiratory conditions, a reporter has confirmed that ICE deported him and his mother to Mexico.

Juan Nicolás has been detained at Dilley since January, where his mother said he’s been consistently sick. According to reports compiled by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Univision’s Lidia Terrezas, and Juan’s mother, at about 3 a.m. on Sunday, Juan suffered a “medical episode” where he was “choking on his own vomit.” He was rushed to a hospital on Monday night and diagnosed with bronchitis. At one point during his hospitalization, he became unresponsive, but was discharged at around midnight and sent back to Dilley on Tuesday before being deported. “His life is in danger because of ICE’s monstrous cruelty,” Castro posted on Tuesday, alongside updates of Juan’s conditions.

“She confirmed that they were practically abandoned at the border. The baby is still sick,” Terrazas posted on Instagram after speaking with Juan’s mother. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Lidia Terrazas (@lidiaterrazasnews)

 

Terrazas explained that the two were only given the money they had left in their commissary (Castro confirmed on Twitter that this was a total of $190) and left without any means to contact the outside world. “She’s in distress, she’s panicking,” Terrazas said. “They were sent to the same place they fled from.” According to Terrazas, a good Samaritan gave them a phone to contact her. 

Naturally, the Department of Homeland Security responded on Tuesday night with a statement featuring a collection of nontruths, labeling Juan a “child,” saying his condition was “stable,” and that “he remained alert and responsive during the evaluation.”

“It is a longstanding practice to provide comprehensive medical care from the moment an alien enters ICE custody…This is the best healthcare than many aliens have received in their entire lives.” (As we’ve had to point out more and more of late, the typo is theirs, not ours.) Apparently, to them, the best healthcare is overcrowded cells where people are forced to lie in their own feces, blocking pregnant girls from essential, life-saving healthcare, and creating conditions so brutal that dozens have died in 2025 alone.

“The mother chose to take her child into custody with her,” DHS added in a heartless tweet on Wednesday. “The mother chose to enter and remain in the country illegally.” This was in response to a tweet that asked, “Why is a 2 month old baby detained by ICE?” Great question.

Dilley, the administration’s facility of choice for detaining families, is where dozens of child detainees wrote letters to ProPublica detailing their misery; where five-year-old Liam Ramos and his father were held for nearly two weeks; and what Castro called a “monstrous machine” when he visited in January. Speaking during a livestreamed video, he said detainees were “literally being treated as prisoners.” 

Dilley is also run and owned by CoreCivic, formerly known as CCA, or one of America’s largest private prison firms, and they have a sketchy history of paying millions in settlements over mistreatment allegations and inmate deaths. It has been a big beneficiary of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, and signed various contracts after the One Big Beautiful Bill allocated about $45 billion to increase ICE detention spaces. Since then, it has also become the target of at least one lawsuit. More recently, the New York Times reported that at least two of its centers have had a measles outbreak, one of its female detainees was only given care after she soaked six sanitary pads in one hour, and a child went deaf in one ear because she was not given timely treatment. 

It’s not clear what’s next for Juan or his mother, but it appears that Terrazas has located them, per an update she posted to her Instagram. Hours after she’d posted a reel saying she intended to find the family in Mexico and promised “to take the baby to get medical assistance, to get checked by a doctor,” she posted a photo of herself holding a baby. 

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