U.S. Customs and Border Protection take in a group of illegal immigrants wandering through the New Mexico desert into custody, and a 7-year-old girl whose father hadn’t given her food or water for days, begins to have seizures just eight hours after being detained, goes into cardiac arrest, and ultimately dies of dehydration and septic shock.
Do you blame the CBP, which worked to get the Guatemalan girl into a helicopter and to a hospital after she began having seizures? Or do you blame the father who dragged his daughter through the desert for several days?
This is the Trump era, so you know exactly who the media is blaming.
“7-year-old migrant girl taken into Border Patrol custody dies of dehydration, exhaustion,” reads the headline of a Washington Post article that Democrats from Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas to former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Joaquin Castro have shared and used to call for investigations into CBP. With a headline like that, one could assume that CBP had the girl in custody for days and that they were the ones responsible for dehydrating her to death. But, of course, the Post buries the lede, waiting for four paragraphs before they mention that the girl “had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”
[DHS: Death of 7-year-old migrant shows ‘dangers of this journey’]
The father dragging his daughter along through the desert for multiple days bears some blame here. At least it’s a relevant aspect of the story. Also, we don’t yet know what care, food, or water CBP provided while she was in custody. So you’d hope the press would wait until more details were available before assigning and implying blame here. But there’s a politically convenient story to tell here, so such balance or caution goes out the door.
The Women’s March said of the girl, “Her death is on this administration’s hands. Just that this is why we can’t stop resisting.”
“Shame on our country and shame on Donald Trump,” said Shaun King in a tweet with 16,000 likes.
Media outlets from CNN to NBC have parroted this line, framing it as the fault of CBP and not at all dereliction of parental duty. BuzzFeed News does deserve credit for noting that the girls seizures began just hours after entering custody, not days as most other outlets suggested.
Never underestimate the media’s ability to use the bodies of migrant children to score a cheap political point, and be careful what you blindly read.
