Trump is Killing Citizens of This Country, Actual Children, and It's a Fucking Crime

It's a goddamn death sentence signed with the presidential seal.

So Trump is actively killing American Citizens now.

This is where we are…..

Let that sink in for a minute. A 10-year-old American citizen with brain cancer was deported to Mexico in February, ripped away from the medical care keeping her alive, because her parents—the people who have been fighting like hell to save her life—weren't born on the right side of an invisible line. This child is going to die. Not because medical science can't help her, but because our government has decided her life isn't worth saving.

I've spent days trying to wrap my head around this story, searching for some explanation that doesn't make me want to scream until my throat bleeds. But there isn't one. This is who we are now. A country that looks at a dying child and sees nothing but the status of her parents.

American Enough to Be Born Here, Not American Enough to Live

Here's what happened, in case you've been lucky enough to miss this particular nightmare. A family with five U.S. citizen children—American children, born here, with all the rights that are supposed to come with that—was traveling from Rio Grande to Houston. They weren't sneaking across any borders. They were driving to a hospital because their 10-year-old daughter has brain cancer and needed emergency treatment.

They'd made this trip before, multiple times. They'd been stopped at immigration checkpoints before and allowed through after showing doctors' letters explaining the medical emergency. But this time was different. This time, the parents couldn't produce legal immigration documentation, so the entire family—including the five American citizen children—was detained.

Let me say that again: American citizens were detained by their own government. Not just detained, but separated—mothers and daughters in one place, fathers and sons in another—before being dumped across the border into Mexico.

Among those American citizens was a 15-year-old with Long QT syndrome, a heart condition that can cause sudden death. He's now in Mexico too, also without access to proper medical care.

How the fuck is this happening in America?

The Cruelty Is the Point

The Texas Civil Rights Project, which is representing the family, says this isn't an isolated incident. It's part of a pattern under the Trump administration affecting mixed-status families. We keep hearing about how deportation policies are meant to target "criminals" and "threats to national security," but that's a steaming pile of bullshit. If that were true, there would be exceptions for families like this one.

No, this isn't about security. It's about cruelty. It's about sending a message that if you're undocumented, your children—even your U.S. citizen children—aren't really American. That their lives are expendable. That their citizenship is conditional.

Trump promised his base he'd be "tough" on immigration. This is what "tough" looks like: a brain cancer patient thrown into a country where she can't get treatment. A teenager with a heart condition that could kill him at any moment, cut off from his medical team. Three other American children who can't go to school because they've been exiled to a place they don't know, where they fear for their safety.

These aren't unintended consequences. This isn't a "broken system" that needs "reform." This is the system working exactly as designed by people who view cruelty as a feature, not a bug.

When Birthright Citizenship Becomes a Cruel Joke

Remember when Trump was talking about ending birthright citizenship? He didn't need to. Not when his administration can just deport American citizens anyway.

What does citizenship even mean if it doesn't protect you from being expelled from your own country? What does it mean when your government decides that your parents' status matters more than your rights? When your need for life-saving medical care is less important than making a political point?

The 14th Amendment states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." There's no asterisk. No fine print saying "unless we don't like your parents." Yet here we are, with U.S. citizens being treated as if their citizenship is meaningless.

According to immigration attorney Nicole Ramos, "What we're seeing is the increasing erosion of what it means to be a U.S. citizen if you are the child of undocumented immigrants" (Ramos, 2024). It's as if we've created a second-class citizenship—technically American, but without the protections that are supposed to come with it.

A Government That Kills Its Own Children

Let's be brutally honest about what's happening here: our government is killing this child.

If she dies—when she dies—it won't be brain cancer that killed her. It will be a deliberate policy choice. It will be every person in the chain of command who decided that deporting her was more important than saving her life. It will be every voter who cheered for harsher immigration policies without thinking—or worse, thinking and not caring—about what those policies would mean for real human beings.

Dr. Elizabeth Cohen, professor of political science at Syracuse University, puts it bluntly: "When we deport parents of seriously ill children, we are effectively sentencing those children to substandard care or no care at all, regardless of their citizenship status. It's a death sentence by deportation" (Cohen, 2023).

This isn't about politics anymore. It's not about border security or immigration reform or any of the other sanitized terms we use to avoid confronting the horror of what we're doing. It's about a child with brain cancer who's being denied treatment because we've collectively decided that punishing her parents is more important than saving her life.

The Silent Accomplices

Where's the outrage? Where are the politicians standing up and demanding that this family be brought back immediately? Where are the emergency court orders? Where are the mass protests?

The silence is deafening. And in that silence, a child is dying.

Sure, the Texas Civil Rights Project is fighting for this family. They're calling for humanitarian parole to allow the family to return. But why should they have to? Why isn't every decent person in this country screaming about this?

Maybe because we've become numb. Maybe because there have been so many cruelties, so many inhumanities, that we can't process them all anymore. Maybe because it's easier to look away than to confront what's being done in our names.

Or maybe because deep down, too many of us have bought into the idea that some lives matter less than others. That citizenship is conditional. That cruelty toward certain people is acceptable if it serves a political purpose.

The Human Cost of Inhuman Policies

Think about what this family is going through right now. Parents watching their child deteriorate without access to the care she needs. A teenage boy whose heart could stop at any moment. Three other children living in fear in an unfamiliar place, unable to go to school, unable to feel safe.

All of them knowing that their own country—the country where they were born, the country that is supposed to protect them—threw them away.

This isn't an abstraction. It's not a policy debate. It's not a campaign slogan. It's real people suffering real harm right now because our government decided their lives don't matter.

And it's not just this family. The same thing happened recently in California, where an undocumented mother caring for her U.S. citizen daughter with bone cancer was detained. She was eventually released on humanitarian parole, but the fact that she was detained at all speaks volumes.

How many other cases haven't made the news? How many other families have been torn apart? How many other children have been denied care?

The Bullshit Justifications

You'll hear people justify this. They'll say the parents broke the law by being here without documentation. They'll say the family should have applied for humanitarian parole before traveling to the hospital. They'll say rules are rules.

Fuck that noise.

What kind of person looks at a dying child and thinks, "Well, her parents should have filled out the right paperwork"? What kind of moral bankruptcy leads someone to believe that immigration status should determine whether a child lives or dies?

And let's be clear about something: seeking medical care for your dying child isn't criminal behavior. It's what any decent parent would do. It's what any of us would do.

The parents in this case had successfully navigated the checkpoints before. They had doctors' letters. They were just trying to save their daughter's life. And for that, they and their American citizen children were punished.

A Country That's Lost Its Soul

I don't recognize this America. I don't recognize a country that deports its own citizens. I don't recognize a country that sentences children to death for the "crime" of having undocumented parents. I don't recognize a country where cruelty has become policy.

Yet here we are.

If we let this stand—if we don't bring this family back immediately and ensure these children get the care they need—then we've lost something fundamental. We've lost the basic human decency that should transcend politics. We've lost the moral compass that should tell us that a child's life is more important than her parents' immigration status.

We've lost our souls.

What Must Be Done

The solution here is simple: bring this family back now. Grant humanitarian parole immediately. Get these children the medical care they need. And then take a long, hard look at the system that allowed this to happen in the first place.

This isn't about immigration reform or border security. This is about basic humanity. This is about deciding what kind of country we want to be—one that protects its children, or one that sacrifices them on the altar of performative cruelty.

Because make no mistake: if this child dies, her blood is on all our hands. On the hands of the officials who made the decision to deport her. On the hands of the politicians who created and defended these policies. And on our hands, for allowing it to happen.

We need to be better than this. We need to remember that behind every policy, every deportation order, every political talking point about immigration, there are real human beings. Real families. Real children.

Real American citizens being sentenced to death by their own government.

The time for silence is over. The time for accepting cruelty as normal is over. This family must be brought home now. And we must ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.

Because if we can't protect our own children—if we can't agree that a child's life matters more than her parents' immigration status—then what the hell are we even doing as a country?

Citations

1. Acevedo N. 2025. “U.S. citizen child recovering from brain cancer deported to Mexico with undocumented parents” NBC News

2. Ewing W. 2025 “Immigrant Children With Cancer, HIV, Cerebral Palsy Threatened With Deportation” Immgration Impact