SAN DIEGO (CN) — U.S. Border Patrol agents drove infants as young as one day old and their asylum-seeking mothers from a San Diego County hospital to the U.S.-Mexico border and forcefully expelled them to Tijuana, the moms claim in a new federal lawsuit.
Four mothers, asylum seekers from Mexico, Honduras and Haiti who were traveling separately and at different times, describe similarly harrowing experiences of desperately trying to escape violence in their home countries while pregnant in the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring and summer of 2020 in their lawsuit against the federal government.
One mother fled Michoacán, Mexico, with her twin five-year-old sons, both of whom are U.S. citizens, after she was tortured and their father was murdered by cartel members. Another fled threats from rival gangs in Honduras.
After being denied medical attention in Tijuana, the mothers entered the U.S. and sought out U.S. Border Patrol agents. Those who had children traveling with them saw their children taken from them before they were taken to a hospital in the border town of Chula Vista.
At the hospital armed Border Patrol agents harassed the mothers before they gave birth by telling them then-President Donald Trump didn't want them in the United States. In another incident, agents not wearing face coverings told a Honduran women that “‘mi papá' then-President Trump would ‘do as he wanted’” with them, according to their lawsuit.
The mothers claim the agents waited outside, and in one case inside, their hospital rooms while they gave birth.
Soon after the birth of their children — U.S. citizens — the mothers say they were quickly taken out of the hospital, sometimes only a day after giving birth, without their children’s birth certificates, reunited with their children at the hospital’s entrance, driven to the U.S.-Mexico border, and then told to walk across a pedestrian bridge to Tijuana.
In one case, a Haitian woman was dragged by agents to the U.S. side of the border, according to the lawsuit.
She spent the next three days sleeping on the streets of Tijuana with her newborn, where she says they were robbed of what little possessions they had.
Once on the other side of the border, another mother fell and hit her head on the sidewalk and dropped her newborn, causing the baby’s eyes to roll back.
The woman eventually returned to Michoacan, where she and her children spent over a year in hiding before an attorney with Al Otro Lado, a nonprofit that provides legal and assistance to migrants and refugees, submitted a parole request for the woman and her children. In July 2022 she was granted asylum in the U.S.
“At the moment these families were at their most vulnerable and desperate for help, Border Patrol agents chose to ignore their legal obligations and to inflict more suffering instead,” the mothers' attorney Bardis Vakili said in a statement. “Post-partum mothers and their newborn babies should be treated with care, not summarily thrust into dangerous situations by government officials disregarding their duties.”
The women claim Border Patrol agents should have known that expelling them and their children to Tijuana put them in danger, and that the agents expelled the children despite their U.S. citizenship and without taking into account that three of the moms feared they would be harmed in Mexico.
“Plaintiff mothers — all of whom were still recovering from delivering the infant plaintiffs one or two days earlier — were expelled with little but the clothes on their backs and their babies in their arms," the plaintiffs say in the complaint. "None of them had money or food, and three did not have a cellphone. None were from Tijuana, and thus they had no home to go to. All were in pain and had been prescribed medication by doctors at the San Diego hospitals where Infant plaintiffs were born, but U.S. Border Patrol agents did not permit them to fill their prescriptions prior to their expulsions.
“Infant plaintiffs are all U.S. citizens. Border Patrol agents knew three of the plaintiff mothers had family members in the United States — including U.S. citizens — willing to care for infant plaintiffs and with whom plaintiff mothers wished the infants to stay. As a direct consequence of their expulsions, plaintiff mothers had difficulty providing basic necessities for their children, as well as for themselves, during the 375, 106, 256, and 220 days, respectively, that they struggled to survive in Mexico.”
The plaintiffs claim the federal government violated the Federal Tort Claims Act, falsely imprisoned them, expelled them when their health and safety were at risk, failed to return their belongings, including hospital paperwork, failed to secure their prescribed medications while they were in custody, failed to provide them with information about how to obtain their children's birth certificates, intentionally inflicted emotional distress, committed assault and battery, and that agents were prohibited from expelling the plaintiffs to Mexico under Title 42’s provision that any noncitizen in danger of being expelled to Mexico who feared persecution was entitled to a “fear screening” from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
In March 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Trump administration invoked Title 42, a public health measure from the 1940s that allows the federal government to suspend trade or immigration into the U.S. from a country where a communicable disease is present for any length of time deemed necessary to protect the country. The Trump administration and U.S. Customs and Border Protection used the rule to refuse to hear legal asylum claims from migrants and quickly expel people who crossed the border.
Over the course of three years, the policy kept more than 2 million people from settling in the United States.
President Joe Biden ended the use of the policy in May 2023.
“What should have been a joyous experience turned into a nightmare for these mothers and their babies.” said Mary Kenney, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys and the deputy director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, in a statement. “While no amount of money can undo the trauma they suffered, they deserve compensation for the government’s unlawful actions.”
The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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