Late Wednesday, officials said that a girl who was 8 years old and in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Texas died.
CBP said in a statement that the child died while she and her family were in U.S. care at the Harlingen, Texas, border facility.
The short statement said, “Emergency Medical Services were called to the station and took her to the local hospital, where she was pronounced dead.”
The Office of Professional Responsibility is looking into what happened and trying to find out what happened. CBP said that the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security and the Harlingen Police Department were also told.
No one knew who the child was or who her family was. Their home country and the date they were taken into U.S. custody were not made public.
Angel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza, a 17-year-old Honduran migrant who was traveling alone, also died in U.S. custody a week before the girl did.
Espinoza was found unconscious at a nearby shelter and taken to the Mease Countryside Hospital in Safety Harbor, Florida, where he was pronounced dead on May 10.
Title 42 was a health law from the COVID-19 era that sent millions of migrants and asylum seekers out of the country. It ended on Friday, and now people are worried that a wave of migrants will come in.
But border officers say that these fears haven’t come true so far.
During a news conference on Wednesday, Blas Nunez-Neto, the assistant secretary for immigration at the Department of Homeland Security, told reporters that the number of daily encounters at the border has dropped from more than 10,000 to about 4,400.
Nunez-Neto said that the 56% drop is less than half of what they usually saw in the four days before Title 42 ended.