A teenage migrant who arrived unaccompanied in the United States from Honduras has died in government custody. In a statement issued over the weekend, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) acknowledged the death of the 17-year-old at a U.S. migrant detention center in Florida.
The Honduran foreign affairs office identified the boy as Ángel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza. The teenager apparently arrived in the U.S. without a parent or guardian on May 5, 2023. U.S. officials said they were investigating the death of the 17-year-old, adding that the cause of his death has yet to be determined.
Since 2018, at least eight unaccompanied refugee children have died at the migrant detention camps set up by the U.S. government. Medical professionals point to the underlying health conditions of the children, who mostly hail from Central America — worsened by the arduous journey to reach the U.S. with little access to clean shelter and proper provisions on the trip — as the main factors causing the deaths.
“Children are not like adults. They get sick more quickly and each hour of delay can be associated with serious complications,” said Dr. Julie Linton, co-chair of the immigrant health special interest group at the American Academy of Pediatrics, in an interview with U.S. media.
Eskinder Negash, president of the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a non-profit organization based in Virginia, said most of the asylum seekers who head to the U.S. border are fleeing poverty and gang violence, and have a lack of education due to the backwardness of the states rooted in U.S. imperialism.
“All of them are vulnerable,” he said, noting that many of the girls report being raped during the perilous journey to the United States in the hope of a better life. “They travel hundreds of miles; they are not coming here because they want to go to Disneyland,” Negash said. “They come here because they have a well-founded fear of violence in their country, their governments, or gangs. If that’s not vulnerable then I don’t know what is.”
The Honduran boy was fleeing from “the hell” created for them over decades by U.S. leaders who openly pursued “regime change” operations in Latin American countries to install puppet regimes and create banana republics, analysts said.
U.S. leaders viewed Latin America as Washingtonian’s backyard with the Monroe Doctrine justifying any overt or covert military action in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba as well as other Latin American countries.
