On May 28, Border Patrol picked up a 16-year-old Honduran girl who had crossed the Rio Grande with her 8 month-old-infant, and sent the young mother and her child to a border processing center in Texas dubbed the perrera (dog pound). There, she said, officers took her daughter’s clothes, milk, and medicine, and put them both in a three-sided cage packed with other migrants. “My baby was naked outside with no blanket for all four days we were there,” she later told attorneys who were investigating whether the U.S. government is violating law by holding kids in unsanitary and unsafe facilities. “We were freezing, [and] my baby couldn’t sleep because the ground was cement with rocks,” she said. “Every time she moved, the sharp ground would scratch her. There were many pregnant women who had to sleep on rocks, and I felt very badly for them.”
From there, the teen mom said, she and her baby were transferred to Ursula, a CBP processing center in McAllen, where they encountered the kind of conditions that have dominated news reports in recent weeks: packed cages, sick and crying babies, inedible and insufficient water and food. When her baby had a fever and began vomiting and having diarrhea, the teenager said she asked for help and the guard responded, “She doesn’t have the face of a sick baby. She doesn’t need to see a doctor.” The food made them sick, and they both lost weight, she said. The baby couldn’t sleep and cried frequently. They couldn’t shower for the first eight days in the McAllen facility.
“I am very scared and anxious,” the girl said in her declaration. “It makes me feel very bad the way they treat us. It is hard being so young and being a mother.”
