Diabetes is widespread, and because access to health care is so limited, diabetic amputations are far more common than in the rest of the country. From afar, she told me, she began to understand that she had grown up in one of the poorest places in the United States, where low-quality, high-calorie food leaves kids both hungry and obese. She left the area for college and medical school. Read: ‘Nothing prepares you for the inhumanity of it’ She had American classmates who lived in Mexico and commuted to school over the international bridge. Each year on All Saints’ Day, she scrubbed relatives’ tombstones in Matamoros with soap and water, then shot BB guns with her cousins at the cemetery. Sevier went to nearby Matamoros, Mexico, for dinner, dentist appointments, weddings, and baptisms. Sevier grew up in Brownsville, and to Rio Grande Valley kids like her, then as now, the border was not a crisis but a culture. It wasn’t the kind of work Sevier usually does. They wanted a doctor to evaluate the children and then use the findings to force the government to improve conditions in Texas immigration facilities. In mid-June, a team of immigration attorneys had asked Sevier to come with them to their next appointment in Ursula, after they’d had an alarming visit there earlier in the month. I visited Sevier’s medical practice last week in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, 60 miles from the Ursula facility, where she’d been a few days before. “We located the bodies,” he said, in paramilitary slang.
Sevier waited.įinally, the guard returned with news. Though 72 hours is the longest a minor can be legally confined in such a facility, some had been there almost a month. In the facility’s standard cages, there is no soap or showering for the kids. “She’s having a bath,” Sevier recalled the guard as saying, a luxury one official told her is available only to babies removed from their guardians. Her tone was polite but firm she knew that she had the right under a federal court settlement to examine whomever she liked. “We can wait,” Sevier said, as she recalled to me in an interview.
But by that point, the friendly and accommodating Border Patrol agent assisting her earlier in the day had been replaced by a dour guard, wearing a surgical mask, who claimed that he couldn’t find the toddler.
When it was almost time to leave, Sevier asked to see a 3-year-old girl, and then two other children. Instead, in a nearby room, she manually reviewed a 50-page printout of that day’s detainees, and highlighted the names of children with a 2019 birth date-the babies-before moving on to the toddlers. But she wasn’t permitted to enter the area where they were being held, many of them in cages, and find the sickest kids to examine. More than 1,000 migrant children sat in the detention facility here, and Sevier, a local pediatrician, had been examining as many as she could, one at a time. MCALLEN, Texas-Inside the Border Patrol warehouse on Ursula Avenue, Dolly Lucio Sevier saw a baby who’d been fed from the same unwashed bottle for days children showing signs of malnutrition and dehydration and several kids who, in her medical opinion, were exhibiting clear evidence of psychological trauma.
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