Coverage of 8-Year-Old Immigrant’s Death a Case of Fake News

The story they chose was that about a sick 8-year-old child dying while in the custody of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Jumping on the story like wolves on fresh meat and before garnering all the facts, the purveyors of news and information pedaled their bogus stories.

The media was sure to attack President Trump as well: “Immigration advocates said the boy’s death was only the latest indication of a larger humanitarian crisis triggered by the Trump administration’s harsh policies,” wrote L.A. Times reporter Laura King with absolutely no proof about Trump’s motives for enforcing immigration laws.

What they originally failed to report was the fact that Border Patrol agents noted the immigrant child was running a high fever (103-degree temperature) and made arrangements for the eight-year-old child to go with his parents to a hospital for triage and medical attention.

It originally came out that it was a decision by physicians to discharge the child, but then there were reports that the child’s father had demanded his son —  be released so they could resume being processed for asylum in the United States. Some reporters even tried to tie the incident to the Trump administration’s — and the majority of American citizens’ — desire for a security wall on the U.S. southwest border with Mexico.

The tragedy of the death of a child, as distressing as it was, caused a media frenzy that did not warrant such coverage. According to former police lieutenant and hospital director of security Jason Boodrow, the media doesn’t give the deaths of American children such emotional coverage.

“American children die everyday from disease, shootings, drunk-driving incidents, and other pathologies. For example, not a week goes by without some innocent children being victims of drive-by shootings, drug overdoses,  parental abuse,  and other deadly actions,” said Director Boodrow..

During a CBS TV News interview segment, the current  U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan appeared to discuss the cases of child deaths involving the so-called caravans of Central American “refugees.”

The transcript of that interview is below and should clarify the ongoing issue of the treatment of children by the U.S. Border Patrol agents many of whom are Latinos and speak the language of the members of the illegal alien “caravan:”

Host Adriana Diaz: Commissioner, good morning. Thank you for joining us. Just to start us off, what is the latest in the investigation of the eight-year-old’s death?

McAleenan: Good morning. Well, with any death in custody we report immediately to our office professional responsibility and the DHS Inspector General. Both of those independent investigative arms have responded and already interviewed the father, and they’ll be pursuing an investigation into the circumstances around this tragic event.

Jacobson: In our reporting earlier, Commissioner, it was said that the child had a 103-degree fever earlier in the day. Why bring a sick child back to a detention center instead of keeping him at the hospital?

McAleenan: Well, that’s a call made by the medical professionals. He was in the emergency room, he spent almost five hours there. It was actually a border patrol agent who noticed that the child did not appear to be well on the morning of Christmas eve and the decision to transport the child and the father to the hospital, and it was the emergency room doctors and nurses who made the decision to discharge the young boy.

Jacobson: But are you satisfied with the medical conditions and facilities, I guess, resources — that are available at these detention centers? Should sick children come back into your custody there?

McAleenan: I’ve explained to Congress, I’ve testified on this, I’ve talked about it publicly for months and months. That what we’re seeing with these flows of huge numbers of families with lots of children — young children as well as unaccompanied minors — coming into border patrol custody after crossing the border unlawfully. Our stations are not built for that group that’s crossing today. They were built 30, 40 years ago for single adult males. And we need a different approach. We need help from Congress. We need to budget for medical care and mental health care for children in our facilities, and I’m committed to improving our conditions, even as we work on the broader problems: border security, and of course, solving the issues in our legal framework that are inviting these families and children to make this dangerous journey.

Diaz: Commissioner, given the misalignment in conditions and resources that you just outlined, I’m curious. We know of two children who’ve died in the past month. Can you guarantee us that there are not more children that we have not heard about that have also passed away?

McAleenan: Certainly there are not more children that you have not heard about in TBP custody that have passed away. This is an extraordinarily rare occurrence. It’s been more than a decade since we’ve had a child pass away anywhere in the TBP process, so this is just devastating for us. We’ve got over 1,500 emergency medical technicians that have been co-trained as law enforcement officers. They work every day to protect people that come into our custody. Border patrol agents made 4,300 rescues the last year. But for this specific scenario where we have these two children that crossed into El Paso sector of our border patrol sector, we responded by doing secondary medical checks. That means paramedics who are also border patrol agents checking each child in our custody to determine their health status again, in addition to the original processing. We’re doing dozens of hospital trips every single day with children that have fevers or manifest other medical conditions and we’ve asked for help. We’ve got two coast guard teams deploying today to support our border patrol agents and checking the welfare of children in our custody. And we’re working to move them to ICE and to better custody situations and releases as quickly as we can, so that we don’t have them in border patrol stations.

Diaz: Commissioner, we were in Mexico traveling with the caravan for days, and we saw children traveling ten hours a day at least, walking under the hot sun, sleeping on the street in really dire, unhealthy conditions. What are you doing to ensure that these children are healthy, as healthy as they can be? And to have two deaths in three weeks, are these children slipping through the cracks?

McAleenan: Well, what we’re seeing is more children than ever before coming into our custody. At this pace in December we’ll have almost 25,000 children, most of them accompanied by parents who have crossed our border and arriving in custody. That’s an enormous flow that’s very different than what we’ve seen before. You mentioned the caravan families that did walk significant distances through Mexico before getting some transportation north of Mexico City. We’re seeing three different models. We’re seeing families coming in the hands of smugglers in very risky situations, taking almost three weeks, held in stash houses against their will, extorted, oftentimes subjects of abuse. We also see this new phenomenon of commercial bus transit, still in the hands of criminal organizations, but only taking four or five days to get to our border. That’s the phenomenon we’re seeing in El Paso sector where we’ve had these two tragedies. Of course, with so many children, with flu season, with many people coming ill, our job is to try to identify any children that need medical care and get them to a hospital as quickly as we can. And we’re doing that. We’re doing that with heart every day.

Dokoupil: Commissioner, quick yes or no. Is the government shutdown for a border wall that you may need, is worth it?

McAleenan: So, we need investments across the cycle —

Dokoupil: We’re really tight on time. Yes or no, do you think that shutdown is worth it?

McAleenan: We need border security investments, absolutely.

Jacobson: All right, commissioner, thank you. We appreciate the time.

McAleenan: Thank you.