Multiple news outlets are reporting the US Regime’s rush to setup and expand concentration camps, based on a hurried policy of enacting forced mass detention to scare people from coming to the US, has killed a girl through a painfully slow and tortured process that started with inadequate health care.
One week after arriving at Dilley, Mariee developed a cough, congestion, and a fever of over 104 degrees. During the next two weeks of her confinement, Yazmin felt powerless as her daughter got sicker, rebounded, and got sick again, battling a virus that started with a common cold.
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But Mariee did ultimately die from an infection that was first detected at Dilley, which has a history of complaints of inadequate medical care for children. In July, two doctors contracted by the Department of Homeland Security released a review of care in facilities including Dilley over the last four years. The doctors found a host of problems and called the practice of family detention “an exploitation and an assault on the dignity and health of children and families.”
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The administration is planning to expand its capacity to hold migrant families by constructing more facilities like Dilley. In June, ICE requested space to hold 15,000 more people in family detention, cementing the policy into the future.
…medical experts and advocates have long stressed that conditions in ICE facilities can be risky for sick children. Detention puts children at higher risk of contracting disease, and crowded, stressful conditions make it harder to recover.
“Those stresses are real; they affect the child’s abilities to fight an infection and illness and win,” said Brian Blaisch, a pediatrician in Oakland, California, who has experience working in immigrant detention centers.
…medical staff at the Texas detention center failed to provide Mariee Juarez with adequate medical care after the healthy girl became sick inside the facility. As a result, the girl died after a treatable respiratory infection turned into pneumonia, according to the legal notice.
Mariee Juarez died on May 10, after “six agonizing weeks in hospitalization and extensive medical interventions,” the legal claim says.
NPR:
When Juárez raised concerns about her daughter’s deteriorating condition, [law firm] alleges, she wasn’t taken seriously. “The medical care that Mariee received in Dilley was neglectful and substandard”…
At the detention facility, Mariee became sick with a severe respiratory infection that went “woefully under-treated for nearly a month,” according to the law firm. Juárez continually sought attention from medical staff but she was prescribed medications that did not improve the child’s condition and Mariee continued to get worse…
Mariee’s symptoms worsened over the coming days and Yazmin Juarez “sought medical attention for Mariee multiple times but was often left waiting for many hours, including at least two instances where she was turned away and told to wait for an appointment on a later day,” according to the claim.
By March 15, Mariee had lost 2 pounds — nearly 8 percent of her body weight — and her symptoms were worse, according to the claim. Mariee was examined at the detention facility’s clinic several more times as her symptoms worsened. Her fever remained high and she was unable to keep down medication or food, according to the claim.
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Mariee died on May 10 after experiencing a catastrophic hemorrhage and “irreversible brain and organ damage with no hope of survival,” the claim states; her cause of death was bronchiectasis, pulmonitis, and a collapsed lung.
The statement also included comments from Dr. Benard Dreyer, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a pediatrician at New York University Langone Health, who reviewed Mariee’s medical records from her time at Dilley. He said it was clear ICE medical staff failed to meet the “basic standard of care” and that the medical staff engaged in “troubling practices,” including the use of unsupervised non-physicians to provide pediatric care over a long period of time.
“If signs of persistent and severe illness are present in a young child, the standard of care is to seek emergency care,” Dreyer said. “ICE staff did not seek emergency care for Mariee, nor did they arrange for intravenous antibiotics when Mariee was unable to keep oral antibiotics down. These are just a few of the alarming examples of how ICE medical staff failed to provide proper medical treatment to this little girl.”
All of this comes after US federal courts already clarified in 2014 “under the Flores settlement, families couldn’t be kept in detention for longer than 20 days”.
While I know this is a sad and tragic story, full stop, there also is an important broader national security subtext here. Being unprepared is the exact opposite of what the US needs to be doing with communicable diseases. And this story emphasizes that the camp conditions themselves dramatically increase likelihood of spreading disease not only because proximity, also because stress and anxiety factors lowering immunity.
The latest research is showing that the girl died because the concentration camp experience itself lowered her ability to survive disease present in the camp.
If the border is meant to process humans safely to enter, or even turn them around to leave for that matter, it has to maintain levels of preparedness to eliminate disease spreading.
Even if the defense in this lawsuit trots out an army of doctors to say they would have done nothing different and ignored symptoms until too late, this actually would demonstrate the US is unprepared and basic humanity of disease control is not being taken seriously. It reminds me of when huge companies went offline from NotPetya because they hadn’t cared enough to help patch/remedy one little machine inside huge global networks.