A 3-year-old girl lost two teeth and suffered deep bite wounds across her face after a 24-year-old illegal immigrant attacked her and her mother in a San Antonio park on April 18, and the Department of Homeland Security says the assault never should have happened. The man had already been arrested for felony assault months earlier, but the Biden administration decided that crime wasn't serious enough to pull his visa.

Atharva Vyas, identified by DHS as an Indian national who entered the United States on a student visa in August 2023, now sits in the Bexar County Detention Center facing charges of injury to a child with intent to cause bodily injury, assault causing bodily injury, and illegal entry from a foreign nation, the New York Post reported.

Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis did not mince words about who bears responsibility for the gap in enforcement that left Vyas free to roam a public park in Texas.

"This barbaric assault against this woman and her 3-year-old child in a park was completely preventable. The Biden administration NEVER should have released this animal following his arrest for assault."

A family outing turned into a nightmare

Gabriella Perez, 27, her partner Xavier Estrada, 27, their daughter Amelia, and grandfather Richard Ariaza had driven from their home in LaCoste to Espada Park for an afternoon of fishing. At around 2 p.m., Perez took Amelia to the restroom. When they stepped back outside, Perez said a man charged straight at them.

He grabbed Perez's hair and punched her in the jaw, she told the Post. Then he went after the child. Perez described lowering Amelia to the ground to shield her, but the attacker pinned the girl down, jammed his thumbs into her eyes, and bit her face and mouth.

Perez screamed for help. Estrada raced to the scene after hearing the commotion. Two men nearby pulled out guns. Witnesses dragged the attacker off the child. When San Antonio police officers arrived, they found Vyas drifting in and out of consciousness. Authorities said he had been under the influence of "wax," a highly concentrated cannabis product, one dose of which, officials noted, is akin to smoking 15 to 20 joints.

Perez recalled the chaos in raw terms. As Breitbart reported, she told the San Antonio Express-News: "I think when everyone was there, I got up and was like this is like a f***ing zombie movie. Like what the heck."

EMS rushed Amelia and her family to Christus Children's Hospital. Perez described the scene there in terms no parent should ever have to use:

"In the emergency room, the adults were all going crazy while Amelia was suffering shock. She sat eerie calm, like a statue, while the nurses and doctors worked on her poor face. She didn't make a peep, even though she was in a great deal of pain. It hadn't hit her yet, what happened."

A prior felony arrest, and a decision not to act

The timeline DHS laid out makes the Biden-era failure difficult to excuse. Vyas entered the country from India in August 2023 on an F-1 student visa. Three months later, he was arrested on the University of Texas campus for felony assault. The university itself contacted ICE after that arrest.

But federal officials under President Joe Biden determined the crime was not "egregious" enough to warrant revoking Vyas' visa. He remained in the country. The case is part of a broader pattern in which Biden-era DHS released individuals with known red flags back into American communities.

It was not until April 2025 that the Trump administration revoked Vyas' F-1 visa based on the earlier assault arrest. By that point, the attack on Amelia Perez had already occurred. ICE lodged a detainer request with San Antonio police on the day of the alleged attack, asking local officers to turn Vyas over after he faces the American justice system.

A DHS spokesman framed the broader enforcement effort plainly: "DHS law enforcement is protecting American communities every day from another senseless tragedy like this taking place in another town, to another family."

A child who may never be the same

Amelia Perez suffered deep scratches and bite wounds across her face and lost two teeth. Her mother described the aftermath in terms that go well beyond the physical.

"She's terrified to sleep. She's lashing out, angry. She doesn't understand evil like this f***ing man. She'll never be the same again."

Perez said she screamed at bystanders during the attack: "Shoot him! Shoot him!" The family has since created a GoFundMe and asked for prayers. "We are focusing on healing and recovery," Perez said. "Even though you try to protect your children, this is a dangerous world with dangerous people."

The case is hardly an isolated incident. Federal authorities have continued to find illegal immigrants with serious violent criminal histories living freely in communities across the country. ICE has arrested illegal immigrants convicted of attempted murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault in operations spanning multiple states.

The accountability question

The central fact is not complicated. A foreign national was arrested for felony assault on a university campus. The school reported him to ICE. Federal authorities reviewed the case and decided it wasn't bad enough to act on. Months later, a toddler paid the price in a public park.

No one in the Biden administration has been named as the specific official who made the call not to revoke the visa. The open question, who reviewed that felony assault arrest and signed off on letting Vyas stay, remains unanswered. So does the question of what standard, exactly, the prior administration applied when it decided a felony assault wasn't "egregious."

The consequences of lax immigration enforcement do not land on the officials who set the policies. They land on families like the Perezes, who drove to a park on a Saturday afternoon to go fishing. Stories like this one echo a grim pattern, including the case of a DHS employee killed while walking her dog by a naturalized citizen with a violent criminal record.

Victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants may contact the VOICE Office, the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office, at 1-855-488-6425.

Meanwhile, some in Congress continue to push legislation that would grant legal status to millions of illegal immigrants already in the country, including an amnesty bill co-sponsored by nineteen House Republicans.

When the government has a man's name, his fingerprints, a felony arrest, and a tip from the university that enrolled him, and still decides to do nothing, the word for that isn't nuance. It's negligence. And a 3-year-old girl in San Antonio has the scars to prove it.