A 16-year-old unaccompanied minor from Guatemala died in federal government custody on Tuesday after spending several days in intensive care at a hospital in Texas, the Department of Health and Human Services reported Wednesday.
The facility where the 16-year-old boy was held before being transferred to the hospital is Casa Padre in Brownsville, Texas — an old Walmart that has since been turned into an immigrant detention center operated by non-profit company Southwest Key. The center has a documented history of abuse.
According to the agency’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which oversees the care of unaccompanied minors, the boy was transferred to Casa Padre on the evening of April 20 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and “upon arrival to the shelter the minor did not note any health concerns.”
“On the morning of April 21, 2019 the minor became noticeably ill including fever, chills and a headache,” ORR spokesperson Evelyn Stauffer said in a statement. “The shelter personnel brought the minor to a hospital emergency department that morning on April 21, 2019 where the minor was treated by the hospital and released later that day back to the shelter. The minor’s health did not improve after being transferred back to the shelter so on the morning of April 22, 2019 the minor was taken to another hospital emergency department via ambulance.”
The cause of death has yet to be determined, but according to BuzzFeed News, which first reported the boy’s death, someone familiar with the case said the boy suffered from headaches and wanted treatment. The Guatemalan consulate told the outlet that the 16-year-old was admitted to the hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, with a severe infection in his frontal lobe and, after a surgery to stabilize the pressure in his head, passed away after seven days of being in intensive care.
The 16-year-old boy from Guatemala is the third reported child death in immigration law enforcement custody since December. As ThinkProgress has previously reported, over just the last two years, 22 immigrants have died in ICE detention centers alone.
“The Trump administration turned this sixteen year old boy’s life into a devastating statistic: the third child to die in the care of US immigration authorities in the past five months alone,” Jess Morales Rocketto, Chair of Families Belong Together, said in a statement. “Too many children have lost their lives in the custody of our government. President Trump should be ashamed. Family separation and his cruel immigration agenda are literally killing children.”
Last summer, as thousands of immigrant children were being separated at the border due to the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, many lived at Casa Padre.
As ProPublica reported last June, Casa Padre has a documented history of abuse. In many cases, the only bathroom the children were allowed to use was located inside their holding pen. They are served meager meals of tortillas and beans and face physical and verbal abuse from the guards.
The abuses were outlined and detailed in a lawsuit filed against then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Noe, a 17-year-old boy from Guatemala who was detained in a CBP facility in Tucson, Arizona, in the same room as a dozen other boys, said the security camera in his room pointed directly at the bathroom. “This makes me uncomfortable,” he wrote.
“There is no privacy. It is dirty and they don’t clean it,” reported a Guatemalan boy named Erick, describing his first three days in U.S. custody near the border. “The room is always very cold. The guards took my sweater. I sleep on the floor. There are 3 mattresses, but the boys from Honduras have taken them,” he said, adding that those other boys threaten to stab him if he falls asleep.
“The guards call all the Guatemalans ‘burros’ or stupid or they say we don’t understand anything,” Erick said.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) attempted to visit the facility last year, but was met with opposition from Southwest Key employees. When Merkley tried to visit, the windows in the front doors were blacked out, making it impossible to see what was happening inside.
“The American citizens are funding this operation, and so every American citizen has a stake in how these children are being treated, and in how this policy is being enacted,” Merkley said during a Facebook livestream of the ordeal.
Merkley, who has visited multiple child detention centers in the last year and is investigating the issue, said on Twitter Wednesday that “this should never have happened and there must be a full investigation into this young man’s death, along [with] immediate action to ensure other children don’t suffer the same fate.”
ORR reported last month that it is on track to detain the highest amount of youth immigrants in the agency’s history. As of late March, around 32,000 unaccompanied minors had been referred to the ORR for custody.