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babylonsister

(171,021 posts) Mon Mar 18, 2019, 08:07 AM Mar 2019

ICE Has Detained a 72-Year-Old Grandfather With Alzheimer's for Nine Months

ICE Has Detained a 72-Year-Old Grandfather With Alzheimer’s for Nine Months
Noé de la Cruz, a grandfather of three, has been in immigrant detention since June 2018—and his family worries that his Alzheimer’s is going untreated.
Scott Bixby
03.18.19 4:43 AM ET

For nearly nine months, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held a 72-year-old grandfather with Alzheimer’s disease in a Texas immigrant detention center. As Noé de la Cruz’s attorneys fight to win asylum status, his only daughter worries that he is forgetting his own grandchildren—and is in danger of losing his life if he is deported.

“When a person gets sick with this kind of disease, it’s a very different situation for that person, and their family, because they are not who they were anymore—they’re more like a child,” Sandra de la Cruz, Noé’s daughter, told The Daily Beast. If her father is deported to his native Mexico, Sandra said, she fears his condition may deteriorate even more quickly.

“He’s going to get lost, and we don’t have family over there who can take care of him,” Sandra said. Speaking through tears, Sandra recounted instances where her father called “three, five, ten times a day” from the Port Isabel detention facility near Los Fresnos, Texas, asking the same questions over and over.

“He also says that he’s getting into fights, but when we go to see him, he doesn’t have bruises,” Sandra said. “We think that the fights are happening in his mind.”

Although his family has petitioned to have de la Cruz released into their care while his removal is adjudicated, ICE has refused, according to Tatiana Obando, de la Cruz’s attorney.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-has-detained-a-72-year-old-grandfather-with-alzheimers-for-nine-months?ref=home