WASHINGTON — He came back sick.
Juan Nicolás — two months old, two months on this earth — was discharged from a South Texas hospital late Tuesday night and returned, along with his mother, to the ICE detention facility in Dilley, Texas, where he was imprisoned to begin with.
He has bronchitis. At some point before his discharge, he was unresponsive.
They sent him back anyway.
Rep. Joaquin Castro, the San Antonio Democrat who has made the fate of this infant a personal crusade, confirmed the discharge in a statement Tuesday. His office has been in direct contact with Juan’s family. The details are stark: the baby was unresponsive at some point in the hours before midnight. Then, despite that, he was discharged around midnight. He and his mother are now back inside Dilley.
This morning, Juan’s mother appeared before an immigration judge. She was told she will be deported. She was not told when. She was not told where.
That is the system functioning as designed.
Let us be precise about what bronchitis means in a two-month-old. It means inflamed airways. It means a respiratory system that is still, at this age, learning to do its job — now under assault, now being forced to fight, inside a facility where an 18-month-old detainee recently developed COVID, RSV, and pneumonia because medical staff gave her ibuprofen for two weeks while her breathing worsened.
Inside a facility where measles walked through the door two weeks ago. Inside a facility where children report that the water itself makes them sick, and where the documented medical protocol, according to multiple declarations, is to tell sick children to drink more water.
Juan Nicolás does not yet know what grass feels like. He does not know what a park looks like. He has spent more than three weeks of his sixty days of life as the property of CoreCivic, a private prison contractor that billed the federal government for the privilege of jailing an infant and then failed to have a physician on site when that infant couldn’t breathe at midnight.
Now he has bronchitis. Now he is back.
Castro has been pushing ICE to release the baby and his mother. That is what hard looks like in America in 2026: a U.S. congressman, working the phones, treating the release of a two-month-old with bronchitis as a legislative priority.
“His life is in danger because of ICE’s monstrous cruelty,” Castro said Tuesday.
ICE has not responded.
CoreCivic, which operates Dilley under federal contract, says health and safety are a top priority. DHS says all detainees receive proper medical care. These statements exist. So does Juan Nicolás, back in a trailer in the South Texas dust, breathing hard, with a deportation order that has no date on it and a mother who does not know what country she will wake up in next.
Somewhere in the paper trail of the Trump administration’s many, many immigration fuck ups, someone made the calculation that a bronchitic infant was not a sufficient reason to release a family from civil detention. Someone signed off on the discharge. Someone determined that returning Juan Nicolás to the facility where his medical emergency originated was appropriate.
That person has not been named. That decision has not been explained.
It should be both.
EDITOR’S NOTE (1): Be sure to follow Lidia Terrazas’ ace reporting for Univision. She has really been on point for this story.
EDITOR’S NOTE (2): Juan Nicolás and his mother remain at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Their deportation has been ordered. No date has been set. Rep. Castro says he will continue to provide updates. I will interview him at 5:15pm ET. Tune in here.
