Border Agency Denies Humanitarian Request

HOUSTON - U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have denied a Mexican couple's third and final attempt to obtain permission to visit their dying daughter in Texas for humanitarian reasons. (Sanchez is shown here with her husband and 5-year-old daughter Melissa.)

Maria Sanchez, 26, has an inoperable tumor on her spine and is being cared for by her husband in their Houston apartment during her final painful days. She hasn't seen her parents in nine years.

“Humanitarian parole is an extraordinary measure, sparingly used to bring an otherwise inadmissible alien into the United States for a temporary period of time due to a very compelling emergency,” a CBP spokesman said. The agency is not allow such parole to be used to circumvent the normal visa-issue procedures in this case, something critics say represents a profound flaw in the normal visa-issuing procedures.

According to The San Antonio Express-News, the parents' first request was denied because the woman's father, Jose Alfredo Sanchez, was deported 13 years ago for being in the United States illegally. A second and separate request from the dying woman's mother, Ninfa Sanchez, also was denied.

Luis Aguillon, Maria Sanchez's husband, has said that he will take his wife's body to Mexico following her death.