Breaking News Emails
Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Dec. 20, 2018 / 1:46 AM GMT
By Annie Rose Ramos and Doha Madani
A migrant mother is blaming American border authorities for her 5-month-old daughter’s contracting pneumonia, saying that she and her child were kept in a “freezing” holding cell for days while in U.S. custody.
The infant is now hospitalized in North Carolina.
The Honduran mother, who asked to not be identified because she is fleeing an abusive partner, said U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents detained her and her daughter on Dec. 12, after they crossed the border illegally by going over a fence.
The 23-year-old mother told NBC News that once in custody, she and her child were kept inside “freezing” holding cells for five days.
Migrants call the holding cells “hieleras,” or iceboxes, because of their allegedly low temperatures. A Human Rights Watch report from February found that migrants were often kept in cold cells for days without basic hygiene products, such as hand soap or toothpaste.
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol told NBC News on Wednesday that it is working to get more information on this case. The agency emailed an internal report dated June 2018 that says holding cells are kept clean and at moderate temperatures between 66 and 80 degrees Farenheit.
The mother said her daughter’s health started deteriorating in the holding cells, and that she did not receive medical care while in custody.
“My baby was perfectly healthy in Tijuana,” the mother told NBC News.
She said that after passing an interview as part of her application for U.S. asylum, she and her daughter were dropped off at a church in San Diego that is operating as a migrant shelter. From there, they flew this week to stay with family in North Carolina.
Once in North Carolina, the baby’s health continued to get worse, and at one point the child stopped breathing, the mother said Wednesday.
The mother said she immediately took her baby daughter to the hospital, and that doctors at Southeastern Regional Medical Center in Lumberton, North Carolina, told her to prepare for the possibility that her daughter may die.
The mother and daughter were part of a migrant caravan of roughly six thousand men, women and children, mostly from Central America, who traveled to the U.S. to seek asylum or legal residency. The caravan arrived in Tijuana, Mexico, in mid-November.
When the mother and child were traveling through Mexico City, a doctor at a migrant shelter gave her an antibiotic in case they might need it during their journey, the mother said.
She told NBC News border agents took the medicine from her. “If I had been able to keep the drugs, maybe they would have made my baby better.”
