Inquiry opens on migrants’ conditions
House panel hears mom’s testimony: ‘She left with no life’
WASHINGTON — The House Oversight and Reform Committee on Wednesday entered the controversy over border detention conditions, hearing wrenching testimony about the death of a toddler in Texas in the first of three hearings investigating what members described as shocking and inhumane treatment of migrants.
At an emotional news conference, members of Congress stood with Yazmin Juárez, a Guatemalan immigrant whose 21-month-old daughter, Mariee, died last year after release from the South Texas Family Residential Center at Dilley, a privately run facility operated under a contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I took her to the emergency room and I took her to three hospitals, and she never left the hospital,” Juárez said. “She left with no life, and it breaks my heart to tell this story.”
The child was given medication, but her condition worsened. She died in May 2018 of a lung laceration that resulted in brain and organ damage, lawyers for the Juárez family have said. Yazmin Juárez is suing the U.S. government for $60 million.
“I watched my baby die slowly and painfully just a few months before her second birthday,” Juárez said at the hearing. “My daughter is gone. The people who are in charge of running these facilities and taking care of these little angels are not supposed to let that happen.”
Juárez said her child became
ill after a week at Dilley and was given Tylenol and honey for her cough and told to follow up in six months. But by the next day she had grown sicker and was running a fever of 104.
She was given antibiotics, but her condition deteriorated further.
The child was scheduled to see a doctor. But mother and child were released that day and flown to New Jersey and the appointment never happened. Mariee died six weeks later.
“When I walked out of the hospital that day, all I had with me was a piece of paper with Mariee’s handprints in pink paint,” Juárez said, a gift from nurses.
Partisan fighting
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., chairman of the Oversight panel, said he scheduled the hearings after House members who visited facilities reported mistreatment of children.
In addition, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general reported last week that children at some facilities had no access to showers and that overcrowding was so severe that adults could not lie down.
“This is governmentsponsored child abuse,” Cummings said. “The Trump administration has repeatedly said that there are no problems in detention centers. I would simply say we refuse to be blinded by what we have seen.”
Cummings said the committee will hold a second hearing Friday and another next week taking testimony about conditions.
San Antonio Democrat Joaquin Castro, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, read the names of six migrant children who have died after being apprehended.
“It’s not just a matter of pumping more money into this broken system. The standards of care must be raised,” he said.
At the hearing of the panel’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties subcommittee, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Dripping Springs, told Juárez, “I cannot possibly imagine what you’ve gone through.”
But Roy accused Democrats on the panel of politicizing border problems and objected to the title given to the hearing, “Kids in Cages: Inhumane Treatment at the Border.”
“It’s setting a tone that doesn’t let us come together address this difficult problem,” he said. “I have seen these facilities and I have not seen a single cage the way it is being depicted.”
Roy said afterward that “the overcrowding has everything in the world to do with the fact that Democrats in the House of Representatives literally refused for months to actually acknowledge that there is a crisis. And the blood is on the hands of the Democrats who refused to actually address this and do their job.”
Warnings of raids
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, DMich., among House members who visited detention facilities recently, said at the news conference that children being detained will be haunted by what they are enduring.
“We are creating a generation of children who will never forget what we did to them. This kind of trauma will never go away,” she said. “These are people who are going to be 16, 17, 18 years of age and they’ll remember what we did to them.”
The recent reports have focused new attention on President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Trump tweeted on Sunday that conditions at the facilities ought to dissuade migrants from coming to the United States.
Advocates for migrants have said that raids the president has threatened could compound problems at detention facilities.
Ken Cucinnelli, acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told reporters Wednesday at the White House that “they (the raids) are absolutely going to happen.”
Pressed for details about when the raids might occur, Cucinelli said: “We’re not going to say.”