Born in a cell: The families stranded at the US border
January 18, 2017
There has been a surge in Latin American families trying to cross the US-Mexico border before Trump’s inauguration.
El Paso, Texas – Sayed came into the world in a border detention cell.
His mother, who had travelled from El Salvador with her husband, daughter and 100 others in a truck swilling with urine, had alerted the US customs guard to the pain in her belly. “He said, ‘Drink that water, sit down and think about if you want to go to the hospital’,” she recalled.
Within half an hour, Veronica’s son had been born. The paramedics arrived just in time, but her ordeal was far from over.
After one night in hospital she and her newborn were sent to Tornillo, a holding centre that had recently been opened 40 miles from El Paso to deal with the surge in Central American families and unaccompanied children migrating to the United States .
The white marquees in the cold Texan desert offer temporary shelter for up to 500 people awaiting detention or release. Veronica had been there two days earlier, but had been told that they didn’t take pregnant women and sent her back to the border cell.
When Veronica awoke after a freezing night huddled in an aluminium wrap, she noticed that Sayed, who was wrapped in blankets, looked sick. “His little mouth was purple and he was vomiting,” she remembered.
They were transferred to the local children’s hospital, where Sayed spent 28 days. Veronica said that the hospital staff told her “he probably got a bacterial infection from the conditions he was born in”.
Her family was one of the thousands of Central American family units that arrived at the US-Mexico border last year, many fleeing crippling poverty and violence.
Family unit apprehensions reached a five-year high of 77,674 in the last fiscal year, according to US government figures, almost double the previous year’s total of 39,838. Arrivals of unaccompanied children rose by nearly 50 percent . The vast majority came from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the so-called Northern Triangle, where murder rates are among the highest in the world.
