A $73 million, twenty-mile section of border fence goes up near Santa Teresa, NM west of El Paso, replacing existing "post and rail" vehicle barriers.
Money for nothing
by Tom Sullivan
A $73 million, twenty-mile section of border fence goes up near Santa Teresa, NM west of El Paso, replacing existing "post and rail" vehicle barriers.
A second migrant child has died in the custody of US Customs and Border Protection. Felipe Alonzo-Gomez, an 8-year-old Guatemalan boy, died late Christmas Eve in a hospital in Alamogordo, New Mexico. His death came just over two weeks after another Guatemalen child, 7-year-old Jakelin Caal, died from dehydration and shock a day and a half after being detailed along with her father and other migrants by border agents from the Antelope Wells, New Mexico port of entry.
CNN reports:
The boy was taken to the hospital Monday after a border agent noticed signs of illness, and the medical staff first diagnosed him with a common cold and later detected a fever.The cause of death in both cases is unreported at this time.
"The child was held for an additional 90 minutes for observation and then released from the hospital mid-afternoon on December 24 with prescriptions for amoxicillin and Ibuprofen," CBP said in a news release. Amoxicillin is a commonly prescribed antibiotic.
On Monday evening, the boy began vomiting and was taken back to the hospital for evaluation. He died hours later, the CBP said.
Xochitl Torres Small, a Democrat who will represent the district [which includes Alamogordo] starting in January, called for a thorough and transparent investigation into the children’s deaths and more medical resources along the border.Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan announced the agency would conduct more health checks on children, focusing on children under 10. CBP is also exploring with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) additional custody options in the El Paso sector as well as additional medical support from "the Coast Guard, as well as possibly more aid from the Department of Defense, FEMA, Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
“This is inexcusable,” she said in a statement Tuesday. “Instead of immediately acting to keep children and all of us safe along our border, this administration forced a government shutdown over a wall.”
Felipe Gonzalez, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, said Monday that the U.S. government’s detention of children due to their immigration status violated international law.
“I can’t tell you when the government is going to reopen,” he told reporters in an Oval Office appearance on Christmas morning. “I can tell you it’s not going to be open until we have a wall, a fence, whatever they’d like to call it. I’ll call it whatever they want. But it’s all the same thing. It’s a barrier from people pouring into our country.”House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi joked that Trump's massive, 30-foot concrete wall has morphed into "a beaded curtain." The section shown at the top is more of the 15-18 foot bollard fence design already in place in short sections of the 2,000 mile border. The auto gate Jakelin Caal and her father walked under at Antelope Wells has 3 miles of vehicle barrier to the east and west, then nothing.
Trump's wall is a $600 hammer approach from haters of government waste, fraud, and abuse to an issue that is localized and manageable. Forget for a moment the cost in tax dollars. How many workers' lives do government actuaries estimate will be lost simply building "wall" in such desolate places?
Happy Hollandaise!
cheers --- digby