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Mariee was 19 months old and her health was described by officials as being in “good condition” when she and her mom were detained by immigration agents after arriving at the U.S./Mexico border from Guatemala this past March to petition for asylum. But the child would be dead within a matter of a few short months.
Mariee began to get sick just days after she and her mom, Yazmin Juarez, were detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center. The asylum-seekers, Bloomberg reports, “were housed in a room with five other mothers and their children, including one boy who was sick with a respiratory infection.” But even though she was diagnosed with an “acute” respiratory infection, Mariee was given only Tylenol and honey packs. Soon, she got worse.
“On March 12,” Bloomberg continues, “she developed diarrhea and vomiting, and in the following days the medical staff allegedly failed to address the toddler’s deteriorating condition,” even though Juarez asked for medical help for her child no less than five times. "After it became clear that Mariee was gravely ill,” her attorneys said, “ICE simply discharged mother and daughter.”
Juarez and Mariee were flown to New Jersey, where Juarez’s mom lives, and “immediately sought medical care for her baby, but it was too late,” her attorneys continued. “Mariee died following six agonizing weeks in the hospital after leaving Dilley.” Now, Mariee’s distraught mom plans to sue, including the city of Eloy, Arizona, over her daughter’s tragic and senseless death.
“As part of a convoluted contracting deal,” Jezebel reports, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “pays the city of Eloy to then pay the private prison operator, CoreCivic, that runs the Dilley detention center in Texas.” But there’s plenty of blame to go around, because for years detainees and their advocates have alleged harmful conditions and inadequate medical care in immigrant detention facilities. Now, those conditions no doubt contributed to the death of an innocent child.
“Can we guarantee that if [she] had been sent to the hospital a week earlier, it wouldn’t have been too late? I can’t guarantee that,” Dr. Benard Dreyer, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said after reviewing Mariee’s medical records. But, he acknowledged to NPR, “the child was very sick and should have been sent to a hospital.” But that’s the kind of negligence to be expected from CoreCivic in particular, a private prison profiteer that was also sued just weeks ago for allegedly forcing immigrant detainees to work for as little as $1 a day or be punished.
“In July,” VICE reported, “two doctors contracted by the Department of Homeland Security released a review of care in facilities including Dilley over the last four years. The doctors found a host of problems and called the practice of family detention ‘an exploitation and an assault on the dignity and health of children and families.’” Instead, the Trump administration is hellbent on ramping up family detention in place of harmful policies like family separation at the border, putting even more children and families at risk.
Migrant families don’t belong in family detention. Instead, they should be allowed humane, proven alternatives where they can have the chance to thrive, be healthy, and fight for a chance to stay in the U.S. It’s tragically too late for Mariee, and she deserves justice, but it doesn’t have to be too late for others. "A mother lost her little girl,” Juarez’s attorneys continued, “because ICE and those running the Dilley immigration prison failed them inexcusably.”