The Washington Post first reported yesterday evening that a 7-year-old girl died of dehydration and shock while in the custody of immigration authorities. The girl was reportedly in federal custody for many hours before she received any medical attention and she died the next day.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen appeared on Fucks & Friends this morning where she essentially blamed the girl's death on her family's choice to travel here.
The girl, identified as Jackeline Caal, from Guatemala arrived with her father in a group of 163 migrants at the U.S. border in New Mexico on Dec. 6. She reportedly began having seizures after she was detained and had a temperature of more than 105 degrees. Officials said Caal had “not eaten or consumed water for several days.” She died about 24 hours after she was taken, by helicopter, to a hospital in El Paso where Caal died of dehydration and shock. [...]
When Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked Nielsen about the incident, the secretary called the situation “heart-wrenching,” but then noted that Caal’s death is “a very sad example of the dangers of this journey.”
“This family chose to cross illegally,” she continued. “What happened here was they were about 90 miles away from where we could process them. They were in such a large crowd that it took our Border Patrol folks a couple of times to get them all.”
According to the Associated Press, the girl and her father along with over 160 other people did, in fact, illegally cross the border, but they voluntarily turned themselves in to border patrol agents. The girl was reportedly in custody for over 8 hours before she received attention and, according to an official statement, Border Patrol says she had not eaten or had anything to drink for days.
To even engage in this debate feels like feeding a troll, but blaming the girl's death on their choice to cross the border illegally is a flat refusal to take responsibility for her death or the policies that led to her death.
A recent report from the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Homeland Security stated that the decision to tightly restrict and place quotas at legal points of entry where a record number of asylum claims are being denied has actually led to an increase in illegal border crossings.
This girl and the group she traveled with may have crossed illegally in any case, but the Trump regime and Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen have made it as difficult as possible to cross legally. Immigrants who've approached legal points of entry have spent days and weeks waiting to apply for asylum and about 65 percent of them are being denied after their long wait. The Trump regime is denying applications at twice the rate the Obama administration did.
Once taken into custody by federal authorities, children become the responsibility of the government and in this case the government failed wildly.