The Trump administration’s anti-family, anti-immigrant policies continue to kill parents and their children. Twenty-one-month-old Iker Gael Cordova Herrera and his mom Idalia Yamileth Herrera Hernández, asylum-seekers who had been forced to wait out their cases in Mexico under inhumane U.S. policy, drowned in the Rio Grande last week, after becoming desperate and deciding to again try to enter the U.S. They never made it.
CNN reported that Idalia and Iker had slept in the streets and in Mexican shelters after U.S. immigration officials sent them back across the border under the Migrant Protection Protocols policy, or “Remain in Mexico.” But asylum-seekers, their advocates, and legal experts have all said that this policy is anything but “protection,” when some families are sent to dangerous regions where violence and kidnappings are becoming more and more common.
Idalia had “told her husband that she felt scared and nervous about crossing the Rio Grande,” but she had no other choice. “So far in 2019, 15 children have died at the US–Mexico border, according to data from the International Organization for Migration,” BuzzFeed News reported, including deaths of kids in U.S. custody. “That is the highest number of dead children since 2014, which is when the organization started tracking deaths along migratory routes for its ‘Missing Migrants Project.’”
This past summer, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his baby, Valeria, also drowned after attempting to cross the river, also having grown despondent after waiting in Mexico for two months for a chance to ask for asylum. Devoid of basic human decency much like the white supremacist in chief he works for, a Trump official went on cable news to blame Óscar for his and his daughter’s deaths. Last December, former Homeland Security Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen also blamed Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin’s death on U.S. watch on the child’s parent.
Advocates have previously warned that the Supreme Court’s move allowing the administration’s Asylum Ban 2.0 to continue for now “will be a death sentence for many of the vulnerable asylum seekers now seeking safety,” but the families fleeing their home countries for the U.S. are already dying. There’s already blood on the hands of this administration. "Imagine, I'm going to cross the river and I don't know how is it going to be,” Idalia’s husband said she wrote in her final text to him. “What if I drown?"
