On 8 December, after less than two days in the United States, Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin died in the custody of US border patrol.
The seven-year-old girl from Guatemala had crossed the US-Mexico border with her father. They left behind a life in which their family of seven lived on just $5 a day and where she’d never owned a toy or a pair of shoes.
Initial reports from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) say that Jakelin died of dehydration and shock but the family have asked for the media to not speculate about the cause of death until a formal autopsy is done.
There are many other vulnerable children currently in the custody of US immigration authorities. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has nine facilities available to detain children who they have been separated from adults, including family members, or who were unaccompanied when they crossed the border.
The average length of stay for a child detained ranges from 100 to 240 days, and these children are often held far from family members and without legal representation.
Up-to-date numbers showing how many children are currently being held by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) aren’t readily available. Even more shockingly, the DHS itself doesn’t have an accurate database for tracking children whom officials have separated from their parents. In April, they lost track of the whereabouts of 1,475 migrant children and a similar incident happened this September when they weren’t able to account for 1,500 migrant children.
Despite all this, estimates have been obtained by journalists. The New York Times reported in September that 12,800 children were in federally contracted shelters based on information that had been reported to members of Congress. Updated estimates published earlier this week now put that number at 15,000.
Contractors who were asked to inspect these detention facilities had been warning the DHS for years about the harm they cause to children. Immigration officials have also been arrested for the sexual abuse of children in their care. But the Ice detention center that employs them claims it is not responsible for these abuses.
Many businesses involved in the detention of migrants at the southern border have political connections, and have been donors to both the Republicans and the Democrats.
In January 2017, the private corrections firm Geo group gave Trump a quarter-million-dollar donation. It also spent $1.7m on lobbying government in 2017 (more than any other private prison contractor) and gave $225,000 to a pro-Trump Super Pac during the election. The Trump administration subsequently gave Geo group over $1.3bn in Ice contracts.
In a statement to the New York Times, Geo Group said that its family center “cared exclusively for mothers together with their children since 2014 when it was established by the Obama administration”.
This is a new column that illustrates numbers from the news each week. Have feedback or ideas for future columns? Write to me mona.chalabi@theguardian.com.