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Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, apparently accused asylum seekers of using sick children "as pawns" to enter the United States on Monday.
In an opinion piece for Fox News, Nielsen warned: "The situation at our southern border has gone from a crisis to a near bankruptcy of the system." As stated by the president, he said: Is a national emergency.
"The system is breaking down, it has not been designed to deal with the volume of vulnerable populations – especially families and children – coming in. The result is a humanitarian and security catastrophe."
Nielsen said, "Smugglers and traffickers force people into inhuman conditions, women are sexually assaulted, and a majority of migrants say they have been abused during the dangerous crossing" of countries from Central America to the United States. -United.
The DHS leader then stated that "children are getting sicker than ever and are being used as pawns to enter" in the United States. "And we are witnessing the spread of violent crimes and drugs on the southern border as criminals exploit chaos."
Nielsen's statements came the same day that Guatemalan authorities announced that Felipe Gomez Alonzo, the 8-year-old boy who died while he was under the custody of the US border police on Christmas Eve, had died after a flu and a bacterial infection.
Gomez and his father, Agustin Gomez, 47, had fled their home village of Yalambojoch in the hope of a better life in the United States and had crossed the border into El Paso, Texas, the December 18th. father had said that his son was healthy when they were arrested the same day, but Gomez Alonzo later developed flu symptoms and was taken to the hospital where he succumbed to the disease.
Gomez Alonzo is the second Guatemalan migrant child to die in custody in the United States in December. An autopsy was made public on Friday, revealing that the other child, 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin, who died on December 8, had also died of a bacterium. infection.
Oscar Padilla, consul of Guatemala in Phoenix, told the Associated Press that the authorities had not been able to accurately determine when and where the two children had been infected. "We do not know if it was in Mexico or on guard at the border.What we do know is that the children have left their homes in good health," Padilla said.
It is unclear where Nielsen's accusation is that sick children have been "used as pawns" to enter the United States. In her opinion piece, she stated that "real action is needed, now".
"Our immigration facilities are no longer in capacity and we can not sacrifice our border security tasks while responding to an unprecedented humanitarian disaster," said Nielsen. "As a nation, we can not stand that."
The DHS official explained that this was why the United States was trying to "hold the countries of the North Triangle – Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador accountable" by signing a regional agreement with the United States. United States, thus indicating their commitment to further combat irregular migration. the US border.
Over the weekend, the State Department also announced that it would enforce a directive from President Donald Trump aimed at ending aid programs to the three Central American countries, despite repeated warnings that the reduction in aid would create only additional instability.
The Democrats fought back against the president's plan. The representative of Texas, Joaquín Castro, described the movement as "myopic and imperfect", while on Monday the representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, warned during a foreign policy discussion at the Wilson Center think tank in Washington, DC, that "if we remove all this funding … I think it will only make things worse, not better."
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