The House Oversight and Reform Committee chair is demanding that the Department of Homeland Security turn over documents regarding the agonizing death of a 16-year-old boy in Customs and Border Protection custody this past spring, telling acting Secretary Chad Wolf, “The department’s failure to care for this sick child appears to be part of a troubling pattern of abuse and poor treatment of immigrants in the department’s detention centers.”
Chair Carolyn Maloney called into question numerous claims made by border officials about Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez’s death that were later proven to be lies in a ProPublica report detailing the boy’s final hours as he lay dying from flu complicated by pneumonia and sepsis in May. “CBP claimed that he ‘was found unresponsive this morning during a welfare check,’” she wrote. “However, the public reporting shows that agents checked on him only after his cellmate notified them of his condition.”
Border officials have claimed that they conducted welfare checks throughout the time Carlos was detained, but those checks supposedly happened during the four hours missing from the border facility’s surveillance footage. How convenient. If agents had been conducting proper checks on the boy as they said they were, they would have clearly seen he was having a medical emergency, as shown in the surveillance video released by ProPublica. “Carlos exhibited increasingly alarming symptoms, including writhing in distress, collapsing, vomiting blood, and finally laying motionless on the floor for hours,” she tells Wolf.
In a letter to the DHS inspector general earlier this month, Congressional Hispanic Caucus members called on investigators to include ProPublica’s report in their probe—and refer findings to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution if needed. “Surveillance video footage demonstrates CBP failed to care for Carlos, and lied about the circumstances around his death,” they said. “The federal government lying about the death of a minor in their custody is unacceptable and requires immediate and further investigations into the personnel involved in these decisions.”
Answers and accountability are needed, and Carlos’ “death was not an isolated incident,” the House Oversight and Reform Committee chair continued in her letter. “At least seven children have died in government custody since 2018, after nearly a decade without any such death.” Dr. Mario Mendoza, a physician with a medical humanitarian group that has offered without success to vaccinate detained people against the flu, said the boy’s death was “preventable,” and said that federal immigration officials were carrying out “passive genocide.”
"An otherwise healthy 16-year-old should not be dying of the flu in 2019, especially in a first-world country like the United States of America,” he said, adding that kids like Carlos “just needed mild supportive care, and that is fever control with antipyretics. They needed hydration, whether oral or IV, and that's about it. And so this was a really preventable death." CBP “falsified records and failed to provide Carlos with proper medical care,” Maloney tweeted. “He was this 6th child to die in U.S. custody this year. I demand justice for Carlos and all those who have died as result of CBP’s criminal negligence.”