Another Migrant Child Dies in Border Patrol Custody

Last updated on December 27th, 2018 at 09:49 am

Another migrant child from Guatemala has died while being held by U.S border patrol officials. An eight year old boy was apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Christmas Eve and died shortly after midnight on Christmas Day, in a hospital in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

The news was first reported in a tweet posted by the San Antonio Express News.

Early this morning, an 8-year-old Guatemalan child died in CBP custody at a hospital in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Official cause of death is still unknown.

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Information about the child’s death came from a press release issued by U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Christmas Day.

The news release said that a U.S. Border Patrol agent had noticed the child was ill after being taken into custody and then the boy and his father were “promptly transferred” to the Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center in Alamogordo.

The child was initially diagnosed with a common cold, the statement said, but hospital staff later found he had a fever. After being held for observation for another 90 minutes, the child was released from the hospital on Monday afternoon with prescriptions for amoxicillin and ibuprofen.

Later that same evening, the statement said, the boy began vomiting and was brought back to the hospital, where he died shortly after midnight on December 25.

The information released by the government did not identify the child nor give an official cause of death.

The death of the Guatemalan boy came just weeks after a 7-year-old migrant girl, Jakelin Caal Maquin, died in Border Patrol custody. A CBP timeline showed she had not been able to access emergency medical care until roughly 90 minutes after she first began showing symptoms. The girl’s father said his ill daughter was given no water for 8 hours while in Border Patrol custody.

Jakelin died on December 8, shortly after she and her father were apprehended while illegally crossing into a remote area of the desert in New Mexico as part of a group of 163 migrants.

The Department of Homeland Security and its secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, drew backlash in recent weeks after appearing to blame Jakelin’s death on the family members who brought her across the US-Mexico border.

In an interview Nielsen said that the girl’s death “is just a very sad example of the dangers of this journey” migrants take.

“This family chose to cross illegally,” she said. “What happened here was that they were about 90 miles away from where we could process them. They came in such a large crowd that it took our Border Patrol folks a couple of times to get them all.”

Congressional Democrats were outraged after hearing about the second child’s death.

Leo Vidal

I am a lifelong Democrat with a passion for social justice and progressive issues. I have degrees in writing, economics and law from the University of Iowa.