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ICE deported Arizona detainee to El Salvador with unremoved medical tube despite hospital orders

ICE deported Salvadoran national Ana Granados Sanchez from its Eloy Detention Center in Arizona on July 28-29, 2026, with a nephrostomy tube still in place more than three months after hospital discharge orders required urologist follow-up within a week of her April 2026 surgery. An independent physician who reviewed her medical records warned before the deportation that the unmanaged tube put her at risk of irreversible complications. DHS did not respond to written press inquiries submitted more than a week before the deportation.

Part of: 2025–2026 ICE Detainee Death Surge

Jurisdiction
Federal
Location
Eloy, Arizona

Abuses documented

Actors

On July 28-29, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported Ana Granados Sanchez, a 49-year-old Salvadoran national, from its Eloy Detention Center in Arizona with a nephrostomy tube and drainage bag still attached, despite hospital discharge orders requiring urologist follow-up within a week of the April 2026 surgery that implanted it. Granados Sanchez underwent emergency surgery at Banner Desert Medical Center after a kidney stone caused her kidney to swell; ICE never scheduled the specialist follow-up in the three months afterward.

On July 23, 2026, the nonprofit Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project gave Eloy ICE officials a letter from Dr. Amy Zaidan, an Emory School of Medicine emergency-medicine physician who reviewed Granados Sanchez's records and found her care "deviates significantly from the standard of care," warning she risked "irreversible complications" without urgent urology evaluation. ICE Health Services Corps, the ICE component responsible for detainee medical care at Eloy, cleared her for deportation anyway. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to written questions the Arizona Daily Star submitted more than a week before the deportation.

Granados Sanchez said ICE officers pressured her to sign deportation paperwork, at one point threatening to "press charges" if she refused, before she was deported to El Salvador -- a country she had not lived in for over a decade -- still carrying the tube and bag. She had held a final removal order since February 2026, when her asylum appeal was denied.

Why we recorded this

Corrections abuse: using custodial power over medical care as a lever of enforcement rather than a duty of care. ICE deported a detainee with an unresolved surgical drainage device in place despite explicit hospital follow-up orders and a physician's written warning of irreversible harm, forgoing its own discretionary authority to grant humanitarian parole. This archive records when a government's custodial duty to provide adequate medical care yields to enforcement priorities, leaving a person to face serious health risk alone in a country she had not lived in for over a decade.

Sources

  1. Medical negligence cited in ICE deportation of Arizona detainee — Arizona Daily Star (Tucson.com) primary accessed July 31, 2026

See also