A White House spokesman said Friday the Trump administration is not responsible for the death of a 7-year-old migrant girl who died after being detained by Border Patrol.
“Does the administration take responsibility for a parent taking a child on a trek through Mexico to get to this country? No,” deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley told reporters.
Jakelin Caal Maquin died last week of dehydration while she was in custody of Border Patrol, the Washington Post reported Thursday. The young girl from Guatemala had crossed into the U.S. illegally with her father and a group of migrants.
Customs and Border Protection records showed the girl and her father were taken into custody in New Mexico about 10 p.m. Dec 6. Eight hours later, the girl began having a seizure. Emergency responders found her body temperature was 105.7 degrees, and she “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”
She later died at the hospital.
Gidley called her death “horrific” and “tragic” but said it was “100 percent preventable.”
“If we could just come together and pass some common sense laws to disincentivize people from coming up from the border and encourage them to do it the right way, the legal way, then those types of deaths, those types of assaults, those types of rapes, the child smuggling, the human trafficking that would all come to an end,” he said.
