Texas pediatrician on border crisis: ‘Kids don’t go in cages’

By Henry Gass July 31, 2019 Articles, Photography

What concerns Dr. Marsha Griffin is the quality of the meals and what is not being detected in the medical interviews, among other things. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What has been your general impression of how the government has been taking care of detained migrant children?

There’s a lot of different agencies that take care of them. I went into the Border Patrol facility in Donna in May, and then I was in two weeks ago again with officials from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Texas Pediatric Society, because we feel that as the leading pediatric organized medical association we need to know how our government is treating children. We came down, and we’ve been down here almost every year for the last four or five years, going in to see what’s going on. And it has gotten increasingly worse.

What are the common medical issues you’ve been seeing?

Sixty-two percent of them are upper respiratory infection. Another 20% are vomiting and diarrhea. And then you’ll have 1 to 2% that are influenza … or you have someone going into premature labor, or you’ve got some child that actually has an upper respiratory but also has a heart condition, and that heart condition was never recognized.

So the EMTs at the Border Patrol facility may have said, ‘This child has an upper respiratory infection,’ but when we see them and we actually examine them, we have to get them to the hospital and we find they actually are in congenital heart failure. It’s not an upper respiratory problem, or it’s an upper respiratory problem on top of something else. That’s not every day, but I think it contributes to why we had six kids die here. Because they’re screening, but they’re not screening the way we would screen, by actually examining them…

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