Hospitalized toddler was returned to ICE detention and denied prescribed medication, lawsuit says
Mike Hixenbaugh
Updated Sat, February 7, 2026 at 10:09 PM GMT
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Kheilin Valero Marcano and Stiven Arrieta Prieto with their daughter Amalia. (via Elora Mukherjee) (via Elora Mukherjee)
An 18-month-old baby held with her parents at a South Texas immigration detention center became so ill last month that she was rushed to a hospital with life-threatening respiratory failure — then sent back to detention days later, where she was denied daily medication doctors prescribed, according to a federal lawsuit filed Friday.
The toddler, Amalia, remained in detention for another nine days and was released only after lawyers filed an emergency habeas corpus petition in federal court challenging her continued confinement. She was freed Friday after the filing.
Amalia had been healthy before immigration officers arrested her family in El Paso in December and transferred them to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, a remote, prisonlike facility where hundreds of immigrant children are held with their parents. Advocates and pediatric experts have warned that conditions at the center are unsafe for young children.
Amalia’s health quickly deteriorated, the lawsuit says. On Jan. 18, she was rushed to a children’s hospital in San Antonio, where doctors treated her for pneumonia, Covid-19, RSV and severe respiratory distress.
Amalia spent 10 days at a hospital before being returned to immigration detention, according to a federal lawsuit. (via Elora Mukherjee) (via Elora Mukherjee)
“She was at the brink of dying,” said Elora Mukherjee, a Columbia Law School professor and the director of the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, who filed the petition seeking the family’s release.
Yet after Amalia’s return to Dilley on Jan. 28, federal officials “denied her access to the medication that doctors prescribed for her at the hospital” the lawsuit says, forcing her parents to “wait in long lines for hours outside daily” to request the medicine, only to be turned away.
After days of intensive treatment on oxygen, Amalia began to recover. But her discharge from the hospital was not the end of her ordeal.
Despite warnings from medical experts that the toddler remained medically vulnerable and at high risk of reinfection, immigration officers returned Amalia and her mother to the detention center, the lawsuit says.
“After baby Amalia had been hospitalized for 10 days, ICE thought this baby should be returned to Dilley, where she was denied access to the medicines that the hospital doctors told her she needed,” Mukherjee said. “It is so outrageous.”
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ByHannah Abraham,Contributor. Hannah Abraham covers Asian entertainment, culture and business.Follow AuthorFeb 01, 2026, 09:33pm ESTFeb 01, 2026, 10:06pm EST
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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