GOP Congressman Calls Two Children Dying in Border Detention an "Excellent Record"
This month, seven-year-old Jakelin Caal and eight-year-old Felipe Gómez Alonzo, both from Guatemala, died in Customs and Border Protection custody. The news sparked a public outcry and calls from Congressional Democrats for the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general to open an investigation. Homeland security secretary Kristjen Nielsen has announced additional medical screenings of all children the department has locked up.
But as the Arizona Republic reports, there have been concerns for months now about the poor and unsanitary conditions where DHS keeps children. And according to NPR, health care workers are struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of people in detention:
"We feel overwhelmed," said Marcela Wash, a nurse in San Diego who is coordinating medical screenings and care for migrants at local shelters. Wash told member station KPBS that some of these migrants are already sick when they're released from CBP custody.
"They come over not having bathed for three or four days, however many days they have been in detention," Wash said. "Some of them arrive with upper respiratory problems, nausea, vomiting."
As ICE makes plans to further expand its already vast network of family prisons, these problems are likely to get worse.
Things like anger, despair, and revulsion are normal, basic human emotion responses to this news. But Republican Congressman Peter King thinks it's actually a testament to how competent organizations like ICE actually are, telling Fox News, "Obviously those deaths are tragic, certainly any time kids die it's terrible, but as far as I know there's no evidence that ICE did anything wrong."
I think it’s wrong to be piling on here and somehow blaming ICE. They’ve had hundreds of thousands of people that they had custody of over the years, and I think these are the only two children that have died, certainly in recent memory. So, considering all of that, considering what does happen in housing projects across the country, I think ICE has an excellent record and I’d be reluctant to be doing any piling on here right now, or trying to make political points with this.
King is setting his bar generously low. Because ICE has existed for 15 years and he's only heard of these two kids dying, well, hey, they're doing a pretty great job over there. Another take is that two children died pointless, preventable deaths from state negligence within a month of each other and that ICE has already self-reported the deaths of 12 other people in custody this year alone.
In any event, a good rule of thumb is that if you find yourself saying, "Yeah, it's bad that kids died, but," it's time to stop talking.
