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10/6/14, "Disease plagues illegal immigrants; lack of medications, basic hygiene blamed," Washington Times, Stephen Dinan
"Communicable diseases continue to be a problem at the New Mexico
facility built to house illegal immigrant families surging across the
U.S.-Mexico border, and the immigrants themselves aren’t taking their
own health care very seriously, according to an audit released Monday.
While
the Border Patrol is doing a good job of handling the surge of illegal
immigrant children traveling alone without their parents, the families
who are being housed at a special facility continue to have health
problems and trouble using the bathroom, the Homeland Security inspector
general said.
“Family unit illnesses and unfamiliarity with bathroom facilities continued to result in unsanitary conditions,” Inspector General John
Roth wrote in a memo to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.
Mr. Roth said the illnesses — which put the facility in Artesia, New
Mexico, on lockdown earlier this year, preventing any immigrants from
being transferred in or out — have proved to be a continuing problem.
Part
of the issue is the immigrants themselves, some of whom have never seen
a doctor before, don’t follow up afterward, either for themselves or
their children.
“If detainees do not attend sick call or stand in
line to receive daily medications, they remain sick and their illnesses
tend to get worse,” the inspector general said.
The inspector general has been reviewing how U.S. Customs and Border
Protection (CBP), a part of the Homeland Security Department, has
handled the surge of children that began to spike earlier this year.
Immigrant-rights
groups had filed dozens of complaints arguing children had been
physically or verbally abused by agents and officers, but the inspector
general has not yet been able to substantiate any of those complaints
and said in its own random interviews it hasn’t uncovered any new
complaints about wrongdoing.
The surge of children has dropped
dramatically, from about 10,000 a month in May and June down to a little
more than 3,100 in August — and the numbers appear to have remained low
in September, the inspector general said.
The Department of
Homeland Security didn’t provide a comment on the latest report, which
is the third one the IG has issued since the surge of children.
Investigators
said with the drop in the number of children, the Border Patrol is
processing those that are arriving much faster. Most are turned over to
the Department of Health and Human Services within 6 hours, or well
ahead of the 72-hour deadline set by federal law.
Conditions have
improved so much that the IG said it was scaling back its
investigations, though it could ramp up again if apprehensions go up or
if new, credible allegations of abuse come to light.
The one
hiccup the investigators did find is that some CBP officers at one
facility weren’t trained in how to segregate immigrant children with
communicable diseases. CBP officials said they would make sure to assign
trained officers whenever there were unaccompanied children at that
facility.
Previous reports had detailed some of the difficulties
of handling the surge, including the communicable diseases some brought,
such as scabies, lice or chickenpox.
And investigators found “unfamiliarity” with bathrooms resulted in unsanitary conditions,
including “exposure to human waste.”
Volunteers who have been at some of the facilities have reported that
the children and families would often try to throw used toilet paper
away,
rather than flush it down the toilet."
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