Child migrant dies as sides dig in on wall
Boy’s death highlights the stalemate over the shutdown
An 8-year-old Guatemalan child detained by US Customs and Border Protection died at Christmas in a New Mexico hospital, the agency reported. He was the second migrant child to die in government custody this month. His death came 17 days after 7-year-old Jakelin Caal, another Guatemalan national, died of dehydration and shock less than a day after she was apprehended by border agents.
The death highlighted the stalemate over US President Donald Trump’s demand that Congress approve additional money for a wall along the US border with Mexico, a standoff that has shut down parts of the federal government for four days.
Trump said again yesterday that there will be no change until his demands are met.
“I can’t tell you when the government is going to reopen,” he told reporters in an Oval Office appearance. “I can tell you it’s not going to be open until we have a wall, a fence, whatever they’d like to call it. I’ll call it whatever they want. But it’s all the same thing. It’s a barrier from people pouring into our country.”
About 25 per cent of the government has been shut down since the weekend.
The President defended his call for US$5 billion to construct a wall along the border with Mexico, saying that only an Olympic athlete would be able to scale such a structure. “If you don’t have that, then we’re just not opening,” Trump said.
All told, about 800,000 of 2.1 million federal workers nationwide — or more than a third — are estimated to be affected in some way by the shutdown. Trump claimed that many government employees support the shutdown.
“Many of those workers have said to me, communicated — stay out until you get the funding for the wall,” Trump said. “These federal workers want the wall.”
His claim conflicted with accounts from the workers’ union leaders.
“Federal employees should not have to pay the personal price for all of this dysfunction,” Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 members at 33 federal agencies and departments, said on Tuesday. “This shutdown is a travesty. Congress and the White House have not done their fundamental jobs of keeping the government open.”
The child who died yesterday had become ill on Tuesday, according to a CBP news release. A Border Patrol agent took him and his father to Gerald Champion Regional Medical Centre in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the boy was diagnosed with a cold, according to the CBP. Later, he was found to have a fever and was held for an additional 90 minutes before he was released with prescriptions for an antibiotic and Ibuprofen.
But the child became more seriously ill, when he vomited and was taken back to the hospital where he died.
The cause of the child’s death is not known. A CBP official familiar with the case said the child was apprehended in El Paso, Texas, and then taken to a Border Patrol cell at a checkpoint between Las Cruces and Alamogordo, New Mexico, because of overcrowding in the El Paso holding cells. The cells in the Alamogordo facility are small, designed to hold an adult for just a few hours during processing. They are not set up to hold families, the official said.
An investigation into CBP actions
will be conducted by the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general and Congress have been notified, it said.
Under guidelines established after the government waited several days to inform Congress about Jakelin Caal’s death, CBP agreed to notify lawmakers within 24 hours of a death of anyone in its custody.
Congresswoman Lucille RoybalAllard, the ranking Democrat on the Health and Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee, said that “the reality is that a detention centre is no place for a child, particularly a sick child. When that child was determined to be ill, had a 103-degree fever, why they would send that child back to a detention centre, which is really not fit for even a well child? That’s something that we’re looking into because that policy or whatever caused them to send that child back has to be changed.”
Ruby Powers, a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the boy’s death is not unexpected given the difficult conditions that immigrants and their children face on the journey north to the United States and the way authorities shuttle families between facilities.
“There’s a lack of ownership of the detainee, thinking they won’t be in their hands very long, moving them along to the next location, and that is where the lack of care can occur,” she said.