Border Patrol Facilities Put Detainees With Medical Conditions at Risk

[DonViejo]

The deaths of two children in Border Patrol custody point to shortfalls in health care provided to migrants, who sometimes arrive with serious illness and injury.

By Sheri Fink and Caitlin Dickerson
March 5, 2019

McALLEN, Tex. — It was nearly 9 p.m., hours after the makeshift clinic for newly arrived migrants near the Mexican border in Texas was supposed to close, but the patients would not stop coming: A feverish teenager with a vile-smelling wound on his foot. A man with a head injury and bright red eyes. Children with fevers, coughs and colds.

Earlier in the day, a little girl named Nancy had been brought into the clinic with a cough and shaking chills. She had been vomiting, she said, and her spine hurt. An assistant took her temperature. “She’s got 104, almost 105,” she said.

The steady flow of migrants who arrived that night at the volunteer respite center operated by Catholic Charities here in the Rio Grande Valley had just been released by Customs and Border Protection after being apprehended near the border. The new arrivals had been in federal custody for up to 72 hours, but most had received no real medical attention — the volunteer physicians at the private clinic were the first doctors many had seen since crossing the border.

“He may lose that leg,” Dr. Martin Garza, a local pediatrician who works at the clinic every other weekend, warned the father of the teenager with the foot wound, handing him a course of antibiotics to take with him. “I cleaned it up as much as I could.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/border-patrol-deaths-migrant-children.html