Internal investigation confirms Border Patrol failures leading up to a 16-year-old’s death on his cell floor

A government investigation into the 2019 death of a Guatemalan teenager in Border Patrol custody has found serious problems with the agency’s handling of sick detainees. The report, obtained by ProPublica through a public records request, concludes that Border Patrol agents did not check on 16-year-old Carlos Hernandez Vasquez, who died of the flu after writhing on the floor of his cell in Weslaco, Texas. The report also found that the case reflected broader problems with care in a detainee system that at the time was overwhelmed with migrants, many of whom were ill. The findings echo the conclusions of a ProPublica investigation from two years ago that revealed how the government failed in taking care of Hernandez.

Hernandez had been detained by Border Patrol agents in May 2019. After being in custody for a few days at an overcrowded processing facility, the Guatemalan migrant had been diagnosed with the flu and was running a 103-degree fever. A nurse practitioner who treated Hernandez wrote that he should be checked again in two hours and taken to the emergency room if his condition worsened. Agents noted in log books that they regularly checked on the boy after he was moved to another Border Patrol station that housed sick migrants. But video surveillance of his cell showed no sign of it, the report said. The government report said that agents never went inside Hernandez’s cell that night as he lay ill. It wasn’t until the morning, when Hernandez’s cellmate woke up and found him unresponsive, that agents finally entered the cell. Falsifying federal records to impede administration of an agency’s function is a crime. But the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas declined to prosecute anyone in Hernandez’s death, the report said. The U.S. attorney declined ProPublica’s request for comment on the decision. The report is by the Office of Inspector General, which is the internal watchdog for the Department of Homeland Security.