"The horror stories from this White House continue from ICE," said Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.).Courtesy Centro Legal de la Raza
When six-year-old Joseph Rodriguez got sick, his mother had to bring him along to her regular check-in at a California ICE office. There, last week, he was immediately detained and quickly deported—all without his hearing aids.
Rodriguez is Deaf; he and his mother Lesly Rodriguez Gutierrez, an asylum seeker from Colombia fleeing domestic violence, live in the congressional district of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who sent staff to Colombia over the weekend to return Rodriguez’ assistive devices. A relative who attempted to provide them to the boy while he was in ICE detention was turned away; ICE officials refused to give him the hearing aids, according to local station KRON.
“This child has been dragged from detention center to detention center, to places that are not meant for children,” his attorney said to KRON. “They are definitely not built for children with severe disabilities. It’s inhuman, illegal, and unconstitutional.”
The family, who were deported as a group—six-year-old Joseph, his four-year-old brother, and Rodriguez Gutierrez, their mother—had lived for four years in the Bay Area city of Hayward, until their detention last week without due process or contact with their lawyers. Joseph was enrolled at the California School for the Deaf in nearby Fremont.
“Think about that for a moment: a six-year-old child with a disability suddenly in a different country, separated from the country he has come to know,” Swalwell said, “now surrounded by silence. The horror stories from this White House continue from ICE.”
Unlike many other medical devices, most hearing aids are highly customized to an individual’s hearing loss, and quality hearing aids can easily cost thousands of dollars, making them extremely difficult or impossible to replace in a situation like Rodriguez’s. (Some Deaf people choose to not use hearing devices and rely entirely on signing; Rodriguez and his family’s proficiency in ASL or other sign languages is unclear, and ICE facilities are not equipped to accommodate Deaf people without assistive devices.)
At the press conference, Swalwell also referenced ICE’s deportation of a six-year-old with cancer, among other deportations and deaths in custody that sum to a pattern of sometimes fatal hostility towards kids and adults with disabilities or other health needs. As I reported in February, the Department of Homeland Security now has just a few staff investigating civil rights complaints, meaning the department and its officials are unlikely to face any internal repercussions for their conduct—or any pressure to change course.
Swalwell, who is also running for governor of California, said that his office was working with the family’s lawyers to secure their return under humanitarian parole, but it’s not clear how long that would take.
“We will not stand by while ICE tears our families apart and endangers innocent children,” Swalwell said at the conference. “What happened here was not about public safety.”
