On May 20th, Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez became the fifth child to die in border patrol custody since December. He was 16, and had been held for a week in a border patrol outpost that lacked proper provisioning. He had fled Guatemala, currently wracked with drought and violence, and reached the U.S. on May 13- at which point he turned himself in and claimed asylum.
Along this same theme, this week we hear a talk entitled, “Dying in Isolation: Migrant Bodies, Uncaring Medicine, and the Lethal Politics of Detention”. Our speaker, Jonathon Inda, is a professor of Latinx Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In his talk, he paints a clear picture of the detention conditions for migrants around the country, citing one particular example where poor medical conditions led to the death of a man who was being held in detention.