The Border Patrol-to-Emergency Room Pipeline

The Border Patrol–to–Emergency Room Pipeline
The conditions in facilities at the border are so dire that many migrants are in need of medical care as soon as they are released.
Arya Sundaram
7:00 AM ET


While cradling her baby, who had just finished breastfeeding, Sara reached her other hand out to her older son. With her right thumb and forefinger, she gently pressed on the bridge of her 2-year-old son’s nose to hold his oxygen mask in place. A foggy mist of breathing medication enveloped his nose and swirled in front of his mouth. The 2-year-old, who has asthma, would soon be diagnosed with pneumonia. His baby brother, in his mother’s arms, was suffering from bronchiolitis. Just one week earlier, Sara said, having traveled hundreds of miles from Honduras, before they entered immigration detention, the boys were healthy.

After crossing the Rio Grande on a small boat in late June, 22-year-old Sara, her two boys, and her 3-year-old daughter turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents to seek asylum in the United States. Their hope was to soon travel to South Carolina, where Sara’s husband was waiting for them. Once on U.S. soil, migrants like Sara and her family are usually taken to Border Patrol detention facilities where they are processed, fingerprinted, and examined by a medical provider.

Although Border Patrol policy says migrants are not supposed to be held there for longer than 72 hours, Sara said her family was there for about six days, and some people were detained there for weeks, according to the government’s own internal review. Mark Weber, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said that as of Tuesday, July 9, Border Patrol wasn’t holding any children longer than 72 hours. Sara, whose last name is being withheld so that she could speak freely on her experiences in detention, said doctors at the facility handed out fever and flu medication, but they didn’t offer anything to remedy the gravelly cough her boys had developed—an early symptom of the infections growing in their lungs. “It was like prison,” she said in Spanish, sitting on a blue couch in an exam room at Valley Baptist Medical Center’s emergency room in Brownsville, Texas.

After Sara and her family were released from the detention facility, they were dropped off at the Brownsville bus station. A city-funded van escorted them to the refugee respite center at Good Neighbor Settlement House. It’s one of many borderlands shelters, often run by faith-based nonprofits, where migrants can stop for a shower, clothes, and food before they travel across the country to meet up with sponsors or relatives. Soon after Sara and her family arrived at Good Neighbor, workers there called an ambulance: The baby had a 103-degree fever.

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While some migrants might arrive sick from conditions in their home countries or on the way to the United States, some doctors I spoke with say that border facilities themselves have become a disease vector. Cursory medical screenings and crowded holding rooms leave tired and weak asylum seekers vulnerable to contracting illnesses both minor and severe. Some migrants become so ill that they’re rushed to the emergency room for treatment either while they’re still in detention or just after they’re released.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/07/border-crisis-reaches-emergency-rooms/594160/