Don't blame Jakelin Caal's death on her father. US policies did this
There are still unknown facts about the death of Jakelin Caal, the sevenyear-old Guatemalan girl who died in the custody of US border patrol. Jakelin became seriously ill while being bussed to a detention center located about 90 miles from the New Mexican desert where she and her father were picked up. US officials have blamed Jakelin’s father, insisting that Jakelin had not had food or water for days when she arrived and that Jakelin’s father signed a form asserting she was healthy when she arrived.
Jakelin’s father has insisted that this is false – that his daughter hadbeen eating and drinking, that they hadn’t undertaken the kind of long desert crossing portrayed in the press, and that the form the US cites was in English, a language he does not speak.
We do know that Jakelin did not receive treatment for 90 minutes after
she began showing symptoms. In the coming days, more information about Jakelin’s death may emerge that will allow us to determine what US officials knew, whether they reacted quickly or not, and whether the medical care she received was adequate.
But these questions are almost secondary, because US responsibility for the suffering of migrant children is already very clear. When asked about Jakelin, a White House spokesman replied: “Does the administration take responsibility for a parent taking a child on a trek through Mexico to get to this country? No.” This attempt to shift blame on to desperate parents ignores critical facts.
First, border patrol, aware that the desert is more difficult to monitor, deliberately seeks to make the desert crossing more deadly for migrants. They have been repeatedly caught destroying stashes of water left in the desert by humanitarian groups, and an investigation by No More Deaths concluded that this was “not the deviant behavior of a few rogue border patrol agents, [but] a systemic feature of enforcement practices in the borderlands”.
An ex-border patrol agent has written about how he once gave water to a four-year-old boy after he found a family lost in the desert. A fellow officer arriving on the scene then kicked the jug out of the child’s hands, saying, “There’s no amnesty here.”
Second, it’s impossible to look at
migration without its context. Caal was an indigenous Mayan who came from severe poverty in the village of Raxruhá. It’s worth remembering that the United States has been a direct cause of the conditions of indigenous Guatemalans over the last half century. Many Americans have forgotten the 1954 coup in which the US overthrew the country’s reformist government, leading to decades of US-backed authoritarian rule. They have also forgotten this country’s role in providing financial and military support for a genocidal government that massacred Guatemala’s indigenous population by the tens of thousands during that country’s civil war. Contemporary conditions in Guatemala are in significant part our responsibility.
The United States has actually made it more likely that immigrants will choose to brave the desert, by closing down other options. During the overland journey from Central America to Mexico, many people are beaten, robbed, kidnapped and sexually assaulted on the journey, by everyone from cartel members to Mexican immigration police. It is, indeed, a dangerous journey to bring a child on, but there are often few other options even for those who wish to legally seek asylum.
The US has imposed massive carrier fees on airlines who allow people to board without visas, even if they are doing so for the purpose of entering the asylum process. And the Trump administration, for all that it performatively wrings its hands over the welfare of children, has also systematically cancelled the few existing programs that allowed a small number of endangered minors to come to the United States to seek asylum without needing to make the perilous trip through Mexico.
Men crossing with their children, as Jakelin’s father did, face a particularly difficult set of options. There are not dedicated facilities to detain dads together with their kids, and separations of fathers from children happened under both Obama and Trump. Last year, a father hanged himself in his cell after his child was ripped from his arms.
It’s difficult for migrants to obtain reliable information about their options, because the government, for political reasons, publicly denies that it continues to “catch and release” migrants at the border, or that it is continuing to separate families. (In reality, both practices are happening regularly.) Migrants rely on word-of-mouth intelligence, or the questionable sayso of coyotes, to understand what will happen to them when they cross the border. A dad who wanted to avoid any chance of being separated from his child might be advised to cross at a remote location where border patrol was less likely to catch them.
Finally, while Jakelin Caal fell ill on a bus and not in a DHS holding facility, it’s worth mentioning that conditions in DHS custody are truly terrible. A child died earlier this year shortly after leaving the South Texas Family Residential Center, where hundreds of women and children – including pregnant women and people with serious health conditions – are confined in close quarters, more than an hour’s drive from any hospital that can provide specialist care. At border holding cells, adults and children are regularly forced to sleep on hard concrete floors, drink contaminated water, sit in their own filth, and endure physical and psychological abuse from border guards. The very facility where Jakelin was held had previously been cited for contaminated water.
Jakelin Caal’s case shows the disturbing human reality of Central American migration. But far beyond her tragic death, US policies and practices continue to contribute to the pain and misery of tens of thousands of desperate families.
Brianna Rennix is an immigration lawyer and an editor at Current Affairs. Nathan Robinson is the editor of Current Affairs
The US has actually made it more likely that immigrants will choose to brave the desert, by closing down other options