This week, the Customs and Border Protection Office (CBP) reported the death of a migrant, just 9 years old, after running out of water in the Arizona desert, while traveling with his mother and another brother. According to the child’s mother, she and her children crossed into the United States with another unknown migrant at dawn on June 15.
The death of the minor was confirmed on June 17, when the 9-year-old boy was recovered after going missing with his mother and brother in the desert near Tubac, in the state of Arizona. The minor’s mother told immigration authorities that her son “had no previous medical problems and she believed that the heat contributed to his medical complications during the walk.”
According to a statement from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the woman, whose name and nationality have not been released, said her 9-year-old son was experiencing seizures. About half an hour later, Tubac firefighters and Border Patrol agents found the family in a remote location where a helicopter could not land and difficult for an ambulance to access.
So the minor had to be carried by the rescue team on foot before he could be transported to the Northwest Medical Center in Sahuarita, Arizona. After being transported to a hospital in Mesa, he was diagnosed with “multi-organ failure and was placed on life support.”
This death occurs after last June, a 42-year-old Nicaraguan migrant who was in the custody of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) died this week in a Louisiana hospital. According to information from the authorities, the immigrant had been detained since he arrived in the country, last April 2020.
The victim was identified as Ernesto Rocha-Cuadra, 42, while in the custody of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service after being detained by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents after entering to the United States on April 17 of last year near Andrade, California.
Rocha-Cuadra died at La Salle General Hospital, in the city of Jena, Louisiana, where he was transferred to a detention center in New Orleans, nine days after his arrival in the United States. Doctors reported the preliminary cause of death as cardiac arrest.
In addition, this occurs after the case of Anadith Tanay Reyes Álvarez, an 8-year-old girl who died, caused by influenza, in May, after the medical team at the detention center ignored her parents’ requests to be taken to a hospital due to the deterioration of the minor.
The young woman had been in the custody of the Customs and Border Protection office in Brownsville, Texas for eight days. Incident records state that Reyes was medically evaluated on May 10 and did not complain of any illness or injury at the time. Reyes’s relatives affirmed that the girl had migrated to the United States because she requested medical assistance, since she had health problems from an early age associated with her heart.
With information from EFE
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