Last month, yet another young migrant died after spending a week in detention near the United States-Mexico border, courtesy of the US Border Patrol.Eight-year-old Panamanian migrant Anadith Tanay Reyes Alvarez had sickle cell anaemia and heart issues, and had recently caught flu. She never received the help she needed from US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to survive, even though her family made at least three requests for help. A week earlier, 17-year-old Honduran migrant Ángel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza died five days after entering a detention facility in Florida, with the actual cause of death still unknown.The xenophobia, anti-Latinx racism, and Islamophobia that have guided US immigration policies since 1986 make anyone singing Neil Diamond’s lyrics “Got a dream to take them there, they’re coming to America” likely to choke on the sheer hypocrisy of it all. Emma Lazarus and her 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus”, with the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, engraved on the Statue of Liberty, are empty promises in this dystopian age.
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