The New Yorker:

More detentions will lead to more deaths, but the Trump Administration has options to conceal the losses.

By Jack Herrera

A cluster of Customs and Border Protection jails stretches from the Rio Grande to the Pacific; farther north, they dot the woods and mountains along the Canadian frontier. Most of the jails are austere, even by the grim standards of detention centers. The communal cells are generally concrete rectangles, without beds or other furnishings. They weren’t built to hold people even overnight, though some migrants have been locked up for weeks at a time. Some of them called the jails hieleras, which means “ice boxes,” or perreras, which means “pounds”—as in, the place you’d keep dogs. Inside, people often get sick, and they sometimes die.

In the 2022 fiscal year (the most recent year for which we have comprehensive data), fifty-two people—an average of one per week—perished in C.B.P. custody. Deaths like these rarely make headlines. However, in December of 2018, there were two exceptions, for an awful reason: the victims were children. On December 8th, Jakelin Caal Maquin, a seven-year-old girl, died of a bacterial infection. On Christmas Eve, Felipe Gómez Alonzo, an eight-year-old boy, died from complications of influenza. Both came from Indigenous communities in Guatemala. Gómez had spent almost a week in detention before he got rushed to the hospital.

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