Andrea Pedro-Francisco was supposed to have surgery more than a month ago.

A cyst on her ovary has swelled to nearly the size of a tennis ball and is now at risk of rupturing or cutting off blood supply. The pain is so severe that her doctor prescribed her an opioid.

She’s only received Tylenol or ibuprofen for the pain since she was arrested on her way to work on Feb. 5 in Minnesota and shipped to a Texas detention center, where she’s waiting for a judge to decide whether her detention is even legal.

“I want to be able to go back to my family,” Pedro-Francisco, 23, said in Spanish in a video interview, wearing a navy blue sweatshirt and looking ashen. “I feel sad. I feel tired. I feel desperate to get out of here and see my family again.”

Her case has been taken up by a team of pro bono attorneys and even members of Congress, but to little avail.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Angie Craig, who represents the Twin Cities suburbs where Pedro-Francisco lives, sent inquiries to Homeland Security officials hoping to pressure them to provide adequate medical treatment.

Craig says she’s been stonewalled with demands for various forms and out-of-office messages citing the partial government shutdown. She said she considered flying to El Paso to conduct an oversight visit but the facility is currently in lockdown because of a measles outbreak.

“We are very worried she could have an infection right now … and the Trump administration won’t do a damn thing about it,” Craig said in an interview. “I don’t want Andrea to die.”

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Pedro-Francisco is one of 4,000 immigrants the Trump administration says it arrested during Operation Metro Surge — although it has not provided an accounting of all those arrests — with some 3,000 federal agents descending on Minnesota for what the Department of Homeland Security called its largest operation ever.

Many have been ordered released by federal judges who ruled their detentions unlawful. But many others remain languishing in federal facilities across the country even if, like Pedro-Francisco, they have no criminal record and have lived in the United States for years.

While the Trump administration repeatedly claimed to be targeting the “worst of the worst,” the vast majority of those arrested during Trump’s second term have no violent criminal charges or convictions, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News.

Taken on the way to work

Pedro-Francisco left her native Guatemala for the United States with her mother to seek asylum in 2019 when she was 16 years old. They arrived in Minnesota with virtually nothing and debt from the journey.

They quickly built a new life. They found jobs cleaning houses, moved into a house in Burnsville, and joined a church. Pedro-Francisco sings in the choir and plays the bajo, a Mexican bass guitar.

“I came here with my family to do something, to achieve something with my own strength, with my own hands. And after that, they took me away,” Pedro-Francisco said.

Pedro-Francisco was driving to work with her mother and a neighbor one Thursday morning when they were stopped by two unmarked vehicles. One parked in front and the other behind. Half a dozen masked men surrounded them, demanding to see their documents, she said.

She said she doesn’t know why they stopped her. There was no warrant for her arrest.

It could be they ran the license plate and saw a Hispanic name. Or because the federal agents believed three Latina women in a car was reason enough to initiate a stop. A federal judge appointed by President Trump found that Homeland Security has racially profiled Latino and Somali residents and arrested them without probable cause, which while unconstitutional, nevertheless yielded results as the Trump administration pursues mass deportations.

The agents put handcuffs on Pedro-Francisco and her neighbor.

Her mother pleaded with an agent to let her go, telling him there was no one to care for her children. She has two younger children, a 5- and a 1-year old, both U.S. citizens.

“‘Who’s going to take care of my children?’ I asked him,” said Pedro-Francisco’s mother in an interview in Spanish, choking back tears. She was granted anonymity due to her fear of retribution from federal officials.

“Then he said, ‘Okay, we’re going to let you go, but only today … If another group catches you, they’ll take you away.’”

She gave her daughter one last hug, and the agents placed Pedro-Francisco, handcuffed, in the back of the unmarked car.

Within a couple hours she was on a flight to Texas.

‘They treat us like animals’ 

Pedro-Francisco was taken to Camp East Montana, a troubled tent prison on the site of a former World War II detention camp for Japanese Americans at Fort Bliss near El Paso.

It was hurriedly constructed last summer to meet the growing need for detention space after the Trump administration enacted a policy of mandatory detention for many undocumented immigrants, even those who have lived in the country for years with no criminal history.

The detention facility is now ICE’s largest: around 3,000 people packed into long tent structures. Pedro-Francisco says she is kept in a room with around 60 people except for about an hour a day, when they are chained together and taken outside.

“They chain us up as if we had committed a very serious crime,” Pedro-Francisco said. “They treat us like animals.”

The ceiling leaks when it rains. The food is inedible. Pedro-Francisco says she’s lost around 10 lbs.

The crowded conditions have also made it a hotbed of disease, with outbreaks of COVID-19, tuberculosis and the measles.

Three detainees died in the facility in a six-week period, including a man who was suffocated in a struggle with multiple guards. His death was ruled a homicide. Suicide attempts are so common that some guards take bets on which detainee will succeed next, according to a former detainee who spoke to the Associated Press.

With complaints of crowded quarters, medical neglect and poor nutrition mounting, ICE recently terminated the $1.3 billion contract with the company operating the facility, Acquisition Logistics. It had never run an ICE detention facility before — nor did it even have a functioning website.

When Pedro-Francisco arrived in early February, she wasn’t receiving any medication except the occasional Tylenol. The pain in her abdomen became so unbearable that within a couple days she was taken to a hospital, where she says a doctor confirmed the cyst yet declined to operate on her because she’s in immigration custody.

As the weeks have passed, she can feel herself getting sicker.

Instead of medical care, ICE has offered her another solution: self-deport. Every two or three days, she says, ICE officials enter their room to ask people to sign forms agreeing to voluntary removal.

Many have taken it, including a man from Minnesota whose lawyer said he only agreed because he was being denied medication for his diabetes.

“But my purpose, for me, here in the midst of suffering, pain and illness, my purpose is to be able to return to my family,” Pedro-Francisco said.

Caught in red tape and judicial delays

By swiftly transferring Pedro-Francisco to Texas, ICE has made it harder for her and other people arrested in Minnesota to challenge their detention through what’s called a habeas corpus petition. That seems to be by design.

Minnesota U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank wrote that he’s seen a “pattern of obfuscation” with ICE “attempting to hide the location of detainees, and thus, make habeas proceedings more difficult.”

Judges in Minnesota have been in revolt over the Trump administration’s policy of mandatory detention and repeated violations of their orders to release immigrants, even threatening the U.S. attorney with contempt.

While judges in Texas have also largely ruled against the Trump administration, the ultra-conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled in its favor, making Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi more favorable venues for the administration to defend a policy that contradicts three decades of precedent.

Federal officials have said they simply ran out of space to hold people in Minnesota during an unprecedented surge in arrests.

Approximately 200 people detained in Minnesota have been transferred out-of-state and remain in detention centers across the country — in Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Nebraska and Mississippi — according to Sarah Brenes, executive director of the Binger Center at the University of Minnesota Law School and one of the directors of the Minnesota Habeas Project.

By the time Pedro-Francisco was connected with a lawyer, she was already in Texas. Her case was taken up by attorney Asra Syed, managing partner at the Austin law firm Botkin Chiarello Calaf. She was referred to Pedro-Francisco’s case through the informal network of volunteer lawyers that sprung up during Operation Metro Surge.

Syed filed a habeas corpus petition to challenge Pedro-Francisco’s detention on Feb. 13 and mentioned her urgent need for medical attention. While the federal government usually has three days to justify its detention of a person, U.S. Judge Leon Schydlower gave the government more than three weeks from when the petition was filed to respond.

“She doesn’t have a way to get the health care that she needs unless she’s out of detention. And how is she supposed to get out of detention unless the judge rules on the habeas petition quickly?” Syed said.

In the interim, Syed filed two more motions asking the court to speed up Pedro-Francisco’s case and order the federal government to administer her prescribed medications and have her examined by an independent hospital physician. They went unanswered.

Syed also reached out to her representative, Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, who connected her with Craig. Democratic U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, who represents the El Paso area that’s home to the detention center, also got involved.

Syed became hopeful, but she and the congresswomen were quickly moored in ICE’s kafkaesque bureaucracy.

In order to conduct oversight, the congresswomen needed Pedro-Francisco to fill out a form authorizing the visit and for Homeland Security to share information about her. But there is no way for Pedro-Francisco to fill out or mail the form in detention. There’s no commissary to buy envelopes and stamps, Syed said. Pedro-Francisco also can’t sign releases giving her attorneys access to her medical records.

An attorney planned to visit the detention center to get Pedro-Francisco’s signatures in person. Then came the measles outbreak, which has stopped anyone from visiting detainees in person, be they attorneys or members of Congress.

Craig said she reached out to a senior DHS official but received a bounceback citing the partial government shutdown. Congressional Democrats are refusing to support renewing funding for the agency without reforms to what they say are ICE’s unconstitutional tactics.

“It’s just stunning, but not surprising at all, that … even as a congressional office, we haven’t been able to get her the help that she needs and deserves,” Craig said.

Her office has received some information from DHS about Pedro-Francisco’s condition — that they’re giving her an antidepressant and birth control pills.

But that’s at odds with what Pedro-Francisco says she’s receiving. She said she went days without even Tylenol to dull the unbearable pain, and then about a week ago also started receiving a prescription, though she’s unsure what it’s called.

Pedro-Francisco said she was also recently examined by a man in the detention center who conducted an ultrasound. He told her she didn’t have anything and gave her two pills to go to the bathroom, but she doesn’t trust anybody in the facility. She’s requested the man’s name and records of her treatment in detention to show her lawyers but has not received either.

Inadequate medical care and poor record-keeping have been documented repeatedly at Camp East Montana, even by ICE’s own inspectors, who found 60 violations in 50 days.

Pedro-Francisco’s case remains at a standstill. The federal government filed an answer to her habeas corpus petition justifying her detention as an undocumented immigrant “seeking admission,” as if she were just apprehended at the border, and cited the recent 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling.

Now it’s up to a judge to decide, though when that will happen is unclear.

“I want to get out of here because I know that at home, where my family is, they can take care of me, and I can go to a doctor,” Pedro-Francisco said.

Madison McVan contributed translation.