Apologies to all if this has already been covered here and I missed it.
A 5-month-old migrant infant girl from Honduras was recently taken into custody by Border Patrol with her mother, held in an ‘icebox’ for days, and had contracted pneumonia by the time they were released. She did eventually get to a hospital and is reportedly doing all right now, but she stopped breathing at one point, and her mother was told to prepare for the worst.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/honduran-baby-hospitalized-with-pneumonia-after-being-detained-by-border-patrol
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/migrant-baby-got-pneumonia-after-days-in-freezing-cell.html
The whole situation is disgusting, but the specific part of this story that particularly pisses me off is that when they arrived, the little girl was recovering from a respiratory infection for which she had already been treated, and her mother had prescription amoxicillin for her, but it was taken away. Her mother’s request to get her to a doctor when she developed a fever and had trouble breathing was also denied. Border Patrol agents allegedly told her she was in a position to request nothing, that they didn't tell her to come to the United States, and called her an ‘invader.’ (She came here trying to escape an abusive relationship, and did jump the fence, after being told she’d have to wait seven weeks to apply for refuge.)
Whether her mother should have jumped the fence can reasonably be debated, but whatever she did, it’s hardly the little girl’s fault. Allowing her to complete her antibiotic course would have cost the government and the agents personally absolutely nothing. There was literally no reason to confiscate those meds. It was an act of sheer malicious cruelty.
Seriously, what kind of monster takes a baby’s medicine away and then refuses to get her medical help?
ETA: Everything else aside, do these morons not know that not finishing a course of antibiotics increases the risk of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that could put many people at risk--themselves included??