Immigrant Mom Sues Private Prison Company Over Toddler's Death For $40 Million

A Guatemalan immigrant mother has sued a private prison company, seeking $40 million in damages, following the death of her toddler, Mariee, six weeks after they were released from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement custody.

Yazmin Juarez, the mother, filed a lawsuit Wednesday against CoreCivic, which runs the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, seeking damages amounting to $40 million over the death of her 21-month-old daughter, reported CNN.

A spokeswoman for CoreCivic said that ICE Health Service Corps handled the medical and mental healthcare facilities at Dilley and referred all questions regarding the issue to them. She also declined to comment on the specifics of the pending litigation.

Last year, Juarez had filed a wrongful death claim seeking $60 million from the U.S. government, alleging that ICE and those who ran the facility provided substandard medical care for her daughter.

Juarez had fled Guatemala with Mariee as she feared their lives were in danger and decided to seek asylum in United States. She planned to build a better life for both of them by coming to the U.S.

They were held at the 2,400-bed detention center for 3 weeks, for illegally crossing the border, before being released. Mariee was diagnosed with respiratory infection at the detention center. A day after they left, Juarez admitted her child to a hospital's paediatric care ICU, but the doctor’s efforts could not save the infant. Mariee died in May 2018, six-and-half-weeks after their release from the detention center.

The lawsuit noted that CoreCivic held families and small children in overcrowded quarters, creating prime conditions for the spread of sickness. It says, “As a result of CoreCivic's recklessness, negligence, and callous indifference to the health and safety of the families and small children detained at Dilley, Mariee suffered an agonizing death, and Ms. Juárez suffered the unimaginable pain of watching her only child sicken, suffer, and die before her eyes."

The lawsuit tries to draw attention to "grave health and safety hazards to children at Dilley and other family detention facilities." It alleges that Mariee died from an ordinary infection that was entirely treatable but was woefully undertreated. Similar concerns about health and safety conditions of children at such immigrant detention centres were raised by whistleblower doctors in reports filed with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Juarez had earlier testified in Congress about the death of her daughter during a hearing on the treatment of children at the southern border.. "I watched my baby girl die, slowly, and painfully, just a few months before her second birthday," Juarez said through an interpreter in her testimony, before she broke down.

"It is painful for me to relive this experience, and remember that suffering. But I am here because the world should know what is happening to so many children inside of ICE detention," she said.