A migrant child died in U.S. custody Monday, marking the fourth such death this year, CBS News reported Tuesday.
The 15-year-old Guatemalan migrant girl crossed the southern border unaccompanied in May, according to CBS, which cited a notice to Congress. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) handed the migrant child to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where she was transferred to an El Paso hospital intensive care unit for a “significant, pre-existing illness.” (RELATED: Biden Admin To Use Former North Carolina Boarding School Campus To House Migrant Children: REPORT)
The child was pronounced dead as “a result of multi-organ failure due to complications of her underlying disease,” according to CBS, which cited the notice to Congress. Her mother and brother were present when she passed away.
TOPSHOT – Young unaccompanied migrants, ages 3-9 watch TV inside a playpen at the Donna Department of Homeland Security holding facility, the main detention center for unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley in Donna, Texas, March 30, 2021. The youngest of the unaccompanied minors are kept separate from the rest of the detainees. (Photo by DARIO LOPEZ-MILLS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Border Patrol encounters of unaccompanied migrant children increased from more than 30,000 in fiscal year 2020 to more than 144,000 in fiscal year 2021 and roughly 149,000 in fiscal year 2022, according to federal data.
Ángel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza, a 17-year-old migrant from Honduras, died in HHS custody in May. A 4-year-old Honduran child also died in HHS care after suffering from a cardiac arrest in March.
An eight-year-old girl named Anadith died in Border Patrol custody in Harlingen, Texas, after experiencing a medical emergency in May. In three different instances, the child’s mother sought medical assistance for her daughter while in custody, but authorities “ignored her pleas to hospitalize her medically fragile daughter,” she previously told The Associated Press.
HHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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