Flu cases suspend migrant processing at McAllen center

Border Patrol officials have temporarily stopped processing apprehended migrants at the agency’s largest detention center, in the South Texas city of McAllen, after nearly three dozen detainees there became ill with the flu.

The halt was ordered late Tuesday, a day after the death of a 16year-old Guatemalan boy who was sick with the flu and had been in custody at the center. The McAllen facility resumed full operations Wednesday afternoon.

Also Wednesday, U.S. authorities say a 10-year-old girl from El Salvador died last year after being detained by border authorities in a previously unreported case. The death marks the sixth known case in the last year.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said Wednesday that she died on Sept. 29 at an Omaha, Neb., hospital of fever and respiratory distress.

Spokesman Mark Weber said the department began caring for the unidentified girl in March 2018. Weber said the girl was “medically fragile,” with a history of congenital heart defects.

On Tuesday, medical staff at the facility — known as the Centralized Processing Center or Ursula, from its address on Ursula Avenue — identified 32 migrants with high fevers and flu-related symptoms. Officials decided to temporarily suspend all intake procedures for migrants to “avoid the spread of illness,” the Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, said in a statement.

Migrants apprehended in the area were processed at other locations while intake was suspended in McAllen, officials said. A Border Patrol official told reporters Wednesday afternoon that the 32 ill detainees had been transferred out of the McAllen center to nearby facilities for further tests.

The flu outbreak and the disruptions it caused raised new questions and controversy over the conditions and the medical care in Border Patrol facilities, as the agency scrambles to handle a surge of migrants arriving from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

The 16-year-old boy, Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez, was found dead Monday morning. He was the third migrant child — all of them from Guatemala — to die in Customs and Border Protection custody in recent months. A fourth, another 16-year-old Guatemalan boy, died last month after being placed in a migrant youth shelter by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Carlos was sick with influenza, but the cause of death is not yet known.

The agency said it has begun an investigation into his death.

After Carlos’ death, officials at the Centralized Processing Center spent Tuesday checking detainees’ temperatures, and identified 32 adults and children who appeared to have influenza. Officials declined to say whether the 32 had been exposed to Carlos, saying the agency was still investigating. But they said the ill migrants were given additional medicine, and some were sent to a hospital and later released back into federal custody.