Another Child Death on the Border

Felipe Gomez Alonzo

HOUSTON — The Latest on the death of an 8-year-old boy from Guatemala who U.S. officials say has died in government custody (all times local):

5:50 p.m.

The father of the 8-year-old Guatemalan boy who died in U.S. government custody says his son had shown no signs of illness before falling sick Monday, the same day he died.

That's according to Oscar Padilla, the Guatemalan consul in Phoenix, who met Wednesday with Agustin Gomez, the father of Felipe Gomez Alonzo. Guatemalan officials have identified Felipe as the child who died on Christmas Eve.

Padilla says Agustin Gomez told him Felipe wasn't sick when they were detained at the U.S.-Mexico border on Dec. 18 or in the five days to follow. Felipe was hospitalized Monday after a border agent noticed he was coughing. He was released from the hospital Monday afternoon, but taken back that night.

Gomez told the consul that he carried Felipe in his arms as they were taken to the hospital for the second and last time.

https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/12/26/us/ap-us-child-dead-border-the-latest

Who Killed Jakelin(Call) Maquin ? The Border Patrol

Fixing a Broken Immigration System

Beyond Deportations: Fixing a Broken Immigration System

http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2016/01/beyond-deportation-fixing-broken.htmlThe Reality Check

When President Obama appointed Dollie Gee to the U.S. District Court in 2010, he undoubtedly didn't expect her to mount a frontal challenge to his administration's detention and deportation policies. But five years after her elevation as the first Chinese American woman on the federal bench, Gee ruled last summer that holding Central American women and children in private detention lockups was illegal.

 

Gee didn't mince words. She called the detentions "deplorable." And she denounced as "fear-mongering" the claim by Homeland Security lawyers that the detentions would discourage more people from leaving Central America.

 

Her angry tone shouldn't have come as a surprise. Gee's father was an immigrant engineer and her mother a garment worker in a Los Angeles sweatshop. After law school, as a young lawyer, Gee sued employers for discrimination and then worked for the Teamsters Union, helping workers and immigrants win representation elections. For Chinese Americans, today's detentions contain ugly echoes of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which led to the brutal detention of thousands of Chinese immigrants on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay 128 years ago.

 

Gee ruled that imprisoning families violated the Flores Settlement, an agreement by the federal government in 1997 that it would release children whenever possible, and hold them in the least restrictive conditions when it could find no one to care for them. But the U.S. appealed Gee's ruling, handed down in August of last year, and in December the Obama administration announced that it would begin deporting Central American migrants who had arrived after May 2014, and who had lost their appeals before immigration judges. Agents then picked up 121 people, including women and children, and sent them to detention centers in Texas.

 

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, defended the action. "Our borders are not open to illegal migration," he said at a press conference. "If you come here illegally, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values."