TIJUANA: Since January, the U.S. government has ordered 16,000 migrants under 18, including nearly 500 infants, to wait with their families in Mexico for U.S. immigration court hearings, a Reuters analysis of government data found.
Along the U.S.-Mexico border, babies and toddlers are living in high-crime cities – often in crowded shelters and tents or on the streets – for the weeks or months it takes to get a U.S. asylum hearing.
The risk of violence and illness runs high and is of particular concern for families with young children or those with chronic health conditions, according to interviews with health professionals, migrants, aid workers and advocates.
The children, whose numbers have not been previously reported, are among tens of thousands of migrants returned to Mexico under a Trump administration policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP). Most are from Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, decisions about whether a person is placed in MPP are made by border agents on a case-by-case basis and include consultation with medical professionals. Unaccompanied minors should not be sent back to Mexico, according to the program guidelines, but children can be sent back with their parents.
Trump administration officials have said they are doing everything possible to discourage migrant families from making dangerous journeys to the United States, often in the hands of human smugglers, which they say needlessly put children at risk.
NUMBERS GROWING AS FLU SEASON LOOMS
About one third of the nearly 50,000 migrants in the MPP program as of Oct. 3 were children under 18, according to the latest data available from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which oversees U.S. immigration courts. Of those, Reuters found around 4,300 under 5 years old and 481 under 1 year old.
Blanca Aguilar, a 27-year-old mother from Guatemala, is living in a makeshift encampment of around 40 small tents cramped together in the back rooms of a church outside Tijuana, across the border from San Diego. Children can be heard coughing and crying throughout the night, she and other mothers told Reuters during a recent visit.
When one gets sick, they all do, Aguilar said. Her two-year-old son Adrian has had a recurrent cough with wheezing, as well as bouts of diarrhea, since they arrived in August.
“He’s been sick a lot,” she said, adding that she suspects he may be developing asthma.
Another mother at the same shelter, 34-year-old Marla Suniga from Honduras, said her 1-year-old daughter Montserrat recently had a convulsion due to a high fever and had to be taken to a hospital. “She couldn’t breathe,” she said.
Suniga said she fled violence in her home country but plans to return there because she fears for her daughter’s life in Tijuana.
DHS said it could not comment on individual cases. Mexican officials did not respond to requests for comment on the conditions in migrant shelters.
Reuters was unable to corroborate the diagnoses of the Suniga and Aguilar children. Doctors and nurses visiting shelters and camps in Mexican border towns, however, told Reuters they have seen cases of chicken pox, scabies, respiratory infections, skin rashes, eye infections and gastrointestinal issues among children and adults.