Politics

shameful: border patrol killed 7-yr-old migrant girl

December 14, 2018

According to a recent report from The Washington Post, a  7-year-old Guatemalan child died after being apprehended by border patrol agents in Chihuahuan Desert of  New Mexico. Her cause of death was dehydration and shock. The Department of Homeland Security says they followed their normal protocol of screening the girl for illnesses and offering her food and water. But immigration reporter Aura Bogado points out that at holding areas, often called “hieleras” or “ice boxes,” they offer migrants water that could make them sick.

“To claim that Border Patrol regularly serve food and water to people in hieleras is a serious stretch of reality and it indicates to me you don’t talk to people about hieleras and rely instead on what the administration is telling you. Hence your narrative,” she wrote on Twitter.

According to the Washington Post, the girl was taken into custody with 163 other people around 10 pm. At 5 AM, her father notified officials that she was  having seizures and vomiting. It wasn’t until a bus arrived 2 and a half hours later that she got any medical attention.  Her body temperature was measured at 105.7 degrees and, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, she had not eaten or had water in several days.

 

The girl’s death will certainly spark scrutiny on CBD’s detention practices as the arrests of immigrant families have skyrocketed. Border Patrol agents arrested a record 25,172 “family unit members” on the southwest border in November.

“The fact that it took a week for this to come to light shows the need for transparency for CBP. We call for a rigorous investigation into how this tragedy happened and serious reforms to prevent future deaths,” the ACLU said in a statement.

And while kids die in detention, the Trump administration is doing its best to make sure nobody steps in to house a migrant child. In a sting, ICE asked for immigrants already in the United States to volunteer to house migrant children. When they came forward, they were arrested under a new Trump policy that allows officials  to “examine the criminal background and legal status of anyone who steps forward to sponsor unaccompanied migrant children.” Of the 170 people arrested, most of them (109) had no criminal background.

https://twitter.com/BridgetMarie/status/1073323055345217541

Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior policy advisor, cruelly used the toddler’s death to push Trump’s border wall. If you want to stop the horrors on the northward trek, … then, for the love of God, fund the border wall,” he said on Fox News, basically promising that the administration would continue killing children until Trump gets his wall.

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