Migrant Teen Dies Unattended In Texas Cell

December 6, 2019 Immigration, Trump Administration

ProPublica reports:

Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez, a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant, was seriously ill when immigration agents put him in a small South Texas holding cell with another sick boy on the afternoon of May 19.

A few hours earlier, a nurse practitioner at the Border Patrol’s dangerously overcrowded processing center in McAllen had diagnosed him with the flu and measured his fever at 103 degrees. She said that he should be checked again in two hours and taken to the emergency room if his condition worsened.

None of that happened. Worried that Carlos might infect other migrants in the teeming McAllen facility, officials moved him to a cell for quarantine at a Border Patrol station in nearby Weslaco. By the next morning, he was dead.

The New York Times reports:



Following Mr. Hernandez Vasquez’s death, a news release stated that he was discovered by federal agents during a welfare check. But a video recording provided by the Police Department in Weslaco, Texas, which initially investigated the case, shows that his death was flagged by his cellmate.

Customs and Border Protection officials have not explained why the recording — in which the teenager vomits blood on the floor, his body crumpling and squirming in apparent distress — has a four-hour gap or why the nurse practitioner’s advice was ignored.

In the last year, tens of millions of dollars have been poured into providing better care for sick migrants in federal custody, but problems persist. Mr. Hernandez Vasquez is the sixth migrant under 18 to have died in federal custody since President Trump took office

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