Migrant deaths: Who is at fault?
On Christmas Eve, 8-year-old Guatemalan migrant Felipe AlonzoGomez died of the flu in the custody of the Border Patrol, after being shuffled among four crowded detention facilities in six days. Two weeks earlier, a little girl named Jakelin Caal Maquin died of shock, dehydration, and a 105.7-degree fever amid reports she was not given water during the eight-plus hours she was in Border Patrol care. The Trump administration’s response to these tragedies was “a new low,” said Karen Tumulty in The Washington Post. First, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen blamed Jakelin’s father for making the perilous journey; then Trump used both children as pawns in his fight to get funding for a border wall. “If we had a Wall, they wouldn’t even try” to come here, he tweeted. Clearly, something is very wrong at the border detention facilities, said Elizabeth Oglesby in TheHill.com. The border facilities are filthy, overcrowded, and intentionally kept so cold that migrants refer to them as “hieleras”—“ice boxes.” Former Border Patrol agents and human rights activists say there is “a culture of cruelty” within the Border Patrol, designed “to punish migrants as a form of deterrence.”
Blaming Trump for the children’s deaths is absurd, said Siraj Hashmi in WashingtonExaminer.com. When thousands of kids make a 1,000mile journey to the border in crowded, filthy conditions with little food or water, illness is inevitable. An American Civil Liberties Union report, issued in May 2018, proves the problems at immigration facilities predate the Trump era. Documents generated from 2009 to 2014—when President Obama was in office—allege that Border Patrol agents frequently beat and sexually abused unaccompanied minors and deprived them of food and medical care. The current rage against Trump is “untethered to the facts.”
The deeper question is, Why are we “locking up migrant kids at all?” said Sally Kohn in The DailyBeast.com. America has a long tradition of welcoming immigrants desirous of “a future that was impossible anywhere else.” These desperate migrants are making legal asylum claims at the border, after fleeing chaos-and-crime-plagued Central American countries. But to rouse Trump’s anti-immigrant base, the administration is denying most of the asylum claims, while locking migrant kids and their parents up in freezing cages. What we need is not a wall, but a coherent immigration policy with heart.