8-Year-Old Boy Dies in US Border Patrol Custody on Christmas Day
An eight-year-old Guatemalan boy
died in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shortly after
midnight on Christmas Day, the second death of a migrant child
detained by the agency this month alone.
According to the Associated Press:
The boy showed "signs of
potential illness" Monday and was taken with his father to a hospital in
Alamogordo, New Mexico, the agency said.
There, he was diagnosed with a cold and a fever, was given prescriptions for amoxicillin and Ibuprofen and released Monday afternoon after being held 90 minutes for observation, the agency said.
There, he was diagnosed with a cold and a fever, was given prescriptions for amoxicillin and Ibuprofen and released Monday afternoon after being held 90 minutes for observation, the agency said.
The boy was returned to the hospital
Monday evening with nausea and vomiting and died there just hours later, CBP
said.
The agency said the cause of the boy’s death has not been determined and that it has notified the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general and the Guatemalan government.
The death of the eight-year-old
Guatemalan boy, whose name has yet to be made public, comes just over a week
after seven-year-old Jakelin Ameí Caal—also from Guatemala—died of "dehydration and shock" while in CBP
custody.
Caal's death sparked outrage at home
and abroad, and Felipe González Morales—United Nations special rapporteur on
the human rights of migrants—demanded an independent probe and an
immediate halt to the detention of immigrant children.
"A reminder that, yes, this is
who the U.S. is," political activist Jonathan Cohn wrote on Twitter following the eight-year-old
boy's death. "The U.S. is a country that murders children both directly
and indirectly in a myriad of ways."