Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin spent her seventh birthday on a trip she was overjoyed to take — traveling with her father from their impoverished farm in rural Guatemala to the United States. Her grandfather remembered her jumping with joy when she found out they were migrating. She was going from a life where her family of seven survived on $5 a day — and where she’d never owned a toy or a pair of shoes — to one where she hoped she’d learn to read and write, and, eventually, join her father in making money to send to their family back home.

Instead, shortly after midnight on December 8 — after barely a day in the United States, 11 hours of which were spent in the custody of US Border Patrol — Caal Maquin was dead in a Texas hospital, with a swollen brain and a failed liver.

Initial reports said the girl had died of dehydration, but the family has asked media to stop speculating about the cause of death until a formal autopsy is conducted this week.

The Washington Post first reported news of the girl’s death on Thursday night. Since then, what happened in the several hours that Caal Maquin was in the custody of US Border Patrol agents has been closely parsed and debated by activists, the media, House Democrats, and Trump administration officials.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General is investigating what happened the night Caal Maquin spent in custody in remote Antelope Wells, New Mexico. Caal Maquin’s family is calling for an independent investigation. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is conducting a fact-finding trip of their own, and accusing Customs and Border Protection of violating a legal obligation by not informing Congress of Caal Maquin’s death until after the Post’s story was published.

Many of the Trump administration’s critics blamed the Border Patrol — saying Caal Maquin was either the victim of misconduct or neglect or that they simply did not do enough to save the girl. The Trump administration, led by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, has blamed Nery Caal for taking his daughter to cross the US-Mexico border illegally over a particularly remote stretch of the New Mexico desert.

The finger-pointing, in every direction, is motivated by the idea that Jakelin Caal Maquin had her childhood innocence stolen from her, and so a thief must be found. But the facts we already have about Caal Maquin’s life and death lead to a more sobering conclusion: that she, and the thousands of children like her crossing into the US each month, never had the option of a carefree childhood.

The journey offered her that chance. It may also be what killed her.

The desert border crossing into the US kills hundreds of people every year, and as migration patterns shift from unaccompanied adults to children and families, it’s likely that more of those who die will be children.

There might seem to be an obvious difference between the death of someone in US government custody — literally, in the government’s care — and the deaths of people who haven’t yet made it to a Border Patrol station. But responsibility for deaths on the border isn’t a switch that flips from “off” to “on” when someone turns themselves in to Border Patrol.

The decision Caal Maquin and her father made was a life-threatening one. Due in part to the policies of Trump and the previous president, it was also the only path available to them.

What happened to Jakelin Caal Maquin in Border Patrol custody

It took more than a week for the public, or even Congress, to find out about Caal Maquin’s death in custody. (Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan even testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee four days after but didn’t bring it up.)

But since Thursday, many details have emerged about what happened in the hours leading up to her death. The most complete account comes from the Washington Post’s Nick Miroff. Caal Maquin’s family has disputed some of the media reports through a statement, but here are the facts neither side is disputing:

Nery Caal and Jakelin Caal Maquin crossed the US-Mexico border in New Mexico on the evening of December 6, part of a group of 162 people. According to the Guatemalan consul in El Paso, who spoke with Nery Caal, they had been dropped off near the border and walked for about an hour and a half through a remote stretch of New Mexico desert known as the “Bootheel” before reaching Border Patrol agents and turning themselves in.

The group surrendered themselves to agents near Camp Bounds, a base along the New Mexico border staffed by small groups of agents on rotations from official Border Patrol offices. The night of December 6, there were four agents on duty.

Camp Bounds didn’t have room to keep immigrants in custody, and had only one bus to transport them. The nearest facility that did, a Border Patrol station in Lordsburg, New Mexico, is 90 miles away. Because Border Patrol protocol requires unaccompanied kids to be separated from all adults, including parents traveling with their own children, the bus first took a group of about 50 unaccompanied children from the group to Lordsburg, then returned to pick up a group that included Caal Maquin and her father. The bus left shortly after 5 am.

Caal Maquin was at the base for seven hours before boarding the bus. Border Patrol agents offered the group food and water; Nery Caal told the agents that she had consumed some.

As Caal Maquin and her father boarded the bus, her father informed the Border Patrol agents that she was unwell and had thrown up. Agents decided that the fastest way to get care would be to keep her on the bus to Lordsburg. By the time the 90-minute bus trip was over, Jakelin had stopped breathing. An EMT revived her.

Agents called a helicopter to pick up Caal Maquin from Lordsburg and take her to the hospital in El Paso, 136 miles away; the helicopter arrived an hour later, and she arrived at an El Paso hospital shortly before 9 am. Her father was driven to the hospital to see her. She died shortly after midnight the next day.

What’s in dispute is what Caal Maquin’s father knew about her health condition and what he told Border Patrol.

Customs and Border Protection officials say that Caal Maquin had gone for several days without food or water before arriving at the border. Nery Caal said in his Saturday statement that that wasn’t true, and he’d given her enough to eat and drink on the journey. (He also pointed out that they hadn’t been walking through the desert for that long.) Some of Caal Maquin’s symptoms — especially the vomiting — are consistent with severe dehydration, which can’t be fixed simply by drinking water without additional nutrients included.

Customs and Border Protection officials also say that agents asked Caal’s father in Spanish about his health and that of his daughter when they were booked into custody, and the father said both were healthy; that answer was marked down on official forms. The statement from Caal Maquin’s father, however, points out that Spanish isn’t his first language — the indigenous language Q’eqchi’ is — and so it’s not clear whether he was asked about his daughter’s health in a language he could understand.

Stories of Border Patrol mistreatment are common. But no one has alleged abuse in Caal Maquin’s case to date.

For years, immigrants and activists have recounted stories of abuse and mistreatment in CBP facilities — most notably in the holding cells known as “hieleras,” which immigrants report are kept uncomfortably cold and where they’re often given only aluminum blankets. (DHS disputes that hieleras are deliberately kept cold.)

The treatment of children while in CBP custody has come under especially close scrutiny; an American Civil Liberties Union report published in spring 2018 based on documents from the Obama administration documented “verbal, physical and sexual abuse” of children by CBP, as well as the denial of clean water and food.

But Caal Maquin’s family isn’t alleging mistreatment by Border Patrol, although they are calling for an independent investigation (and appear particularly concerned about medical screening practices). The Guatemalan consul said that Nery Caal told him he had “no complaints” about Border Patrol’s actions; the family’s statement thanked the “many first responders” who helped try to save Caal Maquin’s life.

The tragedy of Caal Maquin’s death appears to be that an unusually large group of migrants crossed at an especially dangerous part of the US-Mexico border, and arrived at a border crossing that was particularly unequipped to deal with the needs of families and children.

When testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, CBP Commissioner McAleenan acknowledged that his facilities weren’t equipped to deal with large groups of families and children. That may be truer in Antelope Wells, the New Mexico ghost town where Caal Maquin’s group crossed, than anywhere else along the border.

The New Mexican stretch of the border is its least trafficked segment; it’s too remote and too impoverished for many people to take the risk of traveling through there. Even the legal port of entry at Antelope Wells is so remote that it’s only open until 4 pm. None of the 3,150 active-duty troops still deployed to the border are in New Mexico. There were no hielera cells at the base where Caal Maquin and her group were held because there were no holding cells at all — just a concrete indoor “sally port” with no furniture whatsoever.

Far from constant staffing and supervision by professional pediatricians — which is the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation to improve the treatment of Jakelin Caal Maquin and children in custody more broadly — the base only had four agents on night rotation, period.

But New Mexico now appears to be seeing an uptick in large groups of migrants like the one Caal Maquin was in. Apprehensions both in that part of the El Paso Border Patrol sector and in the Yuma sector are reportedly rising quickly (though they’re not yet at the levels of apprehensions of families in the Rio Grande Valley).

That’s a worrisome development. Winter is setting in, and the desert is getting even more inhospitable.

Desert crossings routinely kill migrants

We don’t know how many people trying to get to the US die before they ever make it into Border Patrol custody. In Yuma County, Arizona, alone, remains of more than 100 migrants are found every year.

Official Border Patrol statistics counted more than 7,000 deaths along the border since 2000 — but a USA Today network investigation last year showed that official statistics routinely undercounted, sometimes dramatically so.

The border wasn’t as lethal when it was easier to cross. The rise in deaths along the Arizona desert, in particular, is tied to the increase in enforcement in California in the 1990s, which made crossing through the highest-traffic border crossing (San Diego-Tijuana) all but impossible.

This is a crucial part of border enforcement strategy: concentrating enforcement at the places that are easiest for migrants to cross undetected, so that they are funneled either toward places where they’re easier to apprehend or places that are simply too forbidding to attempt.

A lot of migrants do attempt the forbidding crossings — and they die.

According to Gabriella Sanchez, a researcher with the Migration Policy Centre in Florence who studies smuggling along the US-Mexico border, “The No. 1 mistake migrants make is thinking they’re going to have enough food and water, or that everyone’s going to have the same stamina.” And that’s an even bigger problem in large groups: “They become overly confident.”

If it’s true that Caal Maquin had enough food and water in the days before she crossed into the US, as her father has said, it would make her extremely unusual. Much more common are stories of groups having to share a single can of tuna or a single bottle of water — stories in which parents do everything they can to make sure their children get as much to eat and drink as possible, but where there just isn’t enough to go around. And a lot more people crossing the border now are like Caal Maquin — children from Central American countries arriving with their parents — than was the case 10 years ago.

For the past couple of months, a majority of all immigrants apprehended by Border Patrol have been children or families. Many — though not all — have claimed a fear of persecution in their home countries and asked to seek asylum in the US.

That’s something that migrants ought to be able to do at ports of entry (official border crossings) without breaking US law or risking a wilderness crossing. Secretary Nielsen made that point in responding to Caal Maquin’s death: “This family chose to cross illegally,” she told Fox & Friends on Friday.

But in practice, many families don’t necessarily have that option.

For the past several months, the Trump administration has been routinely turning asylum seekers away from ports of entry and telling them to wait, a practice called “metering” that the administration claims is based on a lack of capacity at ports.

Hundreds of asylum seekers are waiting in Ciudad Juarez to cross into El Paso; thousands are waiting in Tijuana to cross into San Diego. In the Rio Grande Valley, where most families cross and where access to many border crossings is controlled by smuggling networks, smugglers may offer families one or two chances to cross legally — but if those don’t succeed, they’re brought through between the ports instead.

With the safest crossings clogged up, crossing through wilderness is the quickest way into US care. But it also raises the risk of not making it that far.

No one outside her family will ever know if Jakelin Caal Maquin made the right choice

The danger of the crossing is why Nielsen and others are blaming Caal Maquin’s death on her father, who took her on a journey through territory no child should ever have to cross.

But it’s not clear that Jakelin could have survived where she was coming from, either.

Caal Maquin’s family is among the poorest in a village of very poor indigenous Guatemalans, where subsistence farming is getting harder as forests are razed for palm oil. Their family of seven made $5 a day harvesting corn and beans. Jakelin’s grandfather told the Associated Press that the family had to take out a loan, using their farmland as collateral, just to afford to send Jakelin and her father to the US. Even after the girl’s death, the family hoped that her father would be allowed to stay in the US and work to make the money back.

Poverty, even crushing poverty, isn’t valid grounds for asylum under US law. It’s not clear if Caal Maquin and her father would have been able to make a valid asylum claim, or if they’d be among the many asylum seekers whose claims are denied — and who either fade into the US as unauthorized immigrants or return home.

The family might not have known that. Many of the Central American families that have come toward the US this fall don’t appear to know the ins and outs of asylum. What they know is filtered through word of mouth, marketing pitches from people hoping to get paid to smuggle them north, and rumors about US policy — for example, that the border is shutting down entirely. They make the best decisions based on what they know, and they know the journey is dangerous, even if they can’t control the outcome. They are desperate enough to leave even if leaving possibly means death.

The Trump administration cannot control what information families get about the journey — especially when the president himself lacks message discipline — but it can try to change the reality that goes into a person’s decision of whether to stay or go.

Right now, the Trump administration’s immigration policy is focused on making it less appealing to try to come to the US — specifically, by reducing the chance that a migrant will ever be able to earn an American paycheck.

The administration wants to continue to narrow the grounds for asylum, speed up processing of asylum claims (on the assumption that most will be denied), and keep families in custody or in Mexico while those claims are processed so they don’t have a chance to fall between the cracks. The theory is that once people realize that going to the US won’t give them what they want, they won’t cross anymore.

That’s a choice the administration has made. There are other ways it could seek to change the calculus instead.

The administration could reduce the danger of the crossing by facilitating legal entry into the US for asylum seekers. In particular, it could end its “metering” policy in which asylum seekers are turned away from high-traffic ports of entry for days or weeks (or longer); US officials argue that they would need to invest a lot of money in port capacity to have enough room, but that’s a thing that could be done.

Or the administration could work to make life better in the Northern Triangle countries people are fleeing — making it more appealing to stay rather than less appealing to leave. (Officials at both DHS and the State Department are stressing the importance of development aid from the US and Mexico — but it’s not the administration’s highest priority.)

None of these strategies would be guaranteed to work. But the downsides of each are different. And the downside of the policy the administration is currently pursuing is that people — even 7-year-olds — will be forced to choose between risking their lives by leaving and risking their lives by staying.