Seven-year-old Jakelin Ameí Rosmery Caal Maquin and eight-year-old Felipe Gómez Alonzo didn’t have to die, a top medical expert has told Congress, NBC News reports. Both died within days of each other while in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody in December 2018, becoming the first children to die while in federal immigration custody in a decade.
Fiona Danaher, a pediatrician and Harvard Medical School professor who was asked by legislators to testify about their deaths, said that didn’t have to happen. She said she believes both Jakelin and Felipe could have been saved if the children had received the urgent and adequate medical attention they desperately needed.
NBC News reports Jakelin and Felipe, “both from Guatemala, died from the flu and sepsis respectively while in U.S. Border Patrol custody shortly after crossing into the U.S. with their fathers in December 2018. At the time, Customs and Border Protection said the remote locations in which the children arrived and the arduous journeys they had endured complicated their medical care, relieving border agents of any blame in their deaths.”
CBP won’t own up to its negligence, of course, of which there was plenty. In letters to each of the children’s parents, Danaher writes enough wasn’t done to save the kids. “Unfortunately, the border patrol agents at the forward operating base where Jakelin was apprehended did not conduct sufficient screening to identify her illness before the first bus left for the border patrol station,” Danaher wrote to Jakelin’s dad in a letter. “They also did not have adequate training to recognize how sick she was, and they did not call ahead to request that an ambulance meet your bus en route to the border patrol station.”
“As a result, Jakelin did not arrive at the hospital until nearly 12 hours after she was apprehended and more than four hours after your request for medical attention,” she continued. “By the time antibiotics were finally administered, her disease had progressed too far and she could not be saved. Had she received more timely medical care, there is a chance that she could have survived.”
In a separate letter to Felipe’s dad, Danaher writes “[u]nfortunately, the medical care that Felipe received during his first visit to the hospital was inadequate. His clinicians missed important clues about the severity of his illness, and they prescribed the wrong medication to treat him. When you later asked the border patrol agents to take Felipe back to the hospital due to his worsening condition, it took nearly an hour and fifteen minutes for the transporting agent to arrive. All of these errors delayed Felipe receiving the medical care that he so urgently needed.”
Danaher writes Felipe also could have had a chance: “Had he received better and more timely medical care, there is a chance that he could have survived.”
“I hope you know that what happened to Felipe was not your fault,” she assured his parents, and said the same to Jakelin’s parents in her letter to them. “The health care and law enforcement systems that should have protected him, failed him. I will do everything I can to advocate to Congress that the care provided to children at the US border must be improved, so that no other child meets a fate like Felipe’s.”
That she would give this gentle reassurance to these grieving parents is significant: former Department of Homeland Security Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen’s reaction to these children’s deaths wasn’t to go in front of television cameras to pledge that not one more child will again die under her watch, that what happened to Felipe and Jakelin will never happen again so long as she’s in office, but instead to blame the parents for their children’s deaths.