“We cannot stress how dangerous the journey is when migrants come illegally,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said Friday. | AP Photo/Steve Helber Immigration Trump administration rejects responsibility for death of 7-year-old girl in Border Patrol custody

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said Friday that the Trump administration isn’t responsible for the death of a 7-year-old girl in Border Patrol custody.

"Does the administration take responsibility for a parent taking a child on a trek through Mexico to get to this country?“ Gidley said outside the White House, according to a pool report. “No."


U.S. Customs and Border Protection acknowledged Thursday night that a girl from Guatemala died of exhaustion, dehydration and shock less than 48 hours after authorities at the border took the girl into custody along with her father and a large group of migrants who crossed into New Mexico illegally.

Gidley called the death a “horrific, tragic situation” but asserted it could have been prevented with stricter immigration laws.

“It's a needless death, and it's 100 percent preventable,” he said. “If we could just come together and pass some common sense laws to disincentivize people from coming up from the border and encourage them to do it the right way, the legal way, then those types of deaths, those types of assaults, those types of rapes, the child smuggling, the human trafficking that would all come to an end. And we hope Democrats join the president."

The Washington Post reported Thursday that the girl began having seizures roughly eight hours after being taken into custody and was attended to by emergency responders, who found that she was running a 105.7-degree fever. According to CBP, the girl “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”

She was transported to a hospital where she went into cardiac arrest and was revived, though she died less than 24 hours later, the Post reported.

The Homeland Security Department on Friday posted a timeline of the girl’s detention and death on Facebook. The girl’s father advised Border Patrol officials that she had become sick and was vomiting before officials put the family on a bus from an outpost near the border to a Border Patrol Station in Lordsburg, New Mexico, according to DHS. The trip took roughly 90 minutes, the department said.

Upon arrival, “the father notified agents that the child was not breathing,” DHS said.

The girl was then transported by helicopter to a hospital where she was later pronounced dead. DHS said initial indications showed she died from septic shock.

The DHS inspector general’s office will conduct an investigation into the incident, the watchdog announced Friday afternoon. The results will be shared with the department, Congress and the public, the office said.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said earlier Friday the “heart-wrenching” death “is a very sad example of the dangers” migrants face when they try to enter the U.S.

“My heart goes out to the family, all of DHS,” Nielsen said in an interview on Fox News' “Fox & Friends,” where she also touted new border-crossing statistics.

Nielsen on Friday painted the incident as a cautionary tale that could have been avoided had the girl and her father entered into the U.S. legally.

“This family chose to cross illegally,” she said. “They were about 90 miles away from where we could process them. It took a such a large crowd, it took our Border Patrol folks a couple times to get them all.”

While Nielsen said Border Patrol gave the family “immediate care,” she said that DHS would look into the incident.

Still, she said, “We cannot stress how dangerous the journey is when migrants come illegally.”

Though there is no evidence that the girl’s death was exacerbated by the conditions she was held in by CBP, her death has prompted fresh calls for reviews of the detention centers for migrants caught crossing the border illegally, which have lessened some after the outrage sparked by the Trump administration’s so-called zero tolerance policy that led to children being separated from their parents after crossing into the U.S. illegally.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) on Friday noted that there are still several dozen children who are being held in detention centers for various reasons as a result of the previous family separation policy, criticizing the White House for its newest attempt at keeping immigrant families together.

“Certainly all of those children who are separated were traumatized,” Merkley said in an interview on CNN’s “New Day.”

“We also have now a new strategy of traumatizing children, which is we are going to lock them up, and lock them up with their families in camps,” he continued, referring to the Trump administration’s decision to set up tent camps to detain migrant families.

Merkley said the girl’s death was “tragic and awful” but pointed out that there is no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Border Patrol officers. “I hope she got immediate care and received water as everybody should at the border,” he said.

As President Donald Trump threatens to trigger a partial government shutdown in a week over demands for funding to build his long-promised wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, much of the recent immigration debate has centered around several caravans of thousands of migrants traveling from Central America to seek asylum in the U.S. Trump made the caravans a focal point of his stump speech just before the midterm elections, claiming, without evidence, that they included terrorists from the Middle East attempting to sneak into the U.S.

In the days leading up to last month‘s midterm, Trump ordered the deployment of U.S. troops and resources along the border to shore up security, a move critics have panned as a wasteful political ploy and a misuse of the military.

While Trump framed the caravans as an immediate national security threat to the country, a large number of the migrants has concentrated just outside of the U.S. in Tijuana, Mexico, where they have reportedly put a strain on local resources. In recent weeks, CBP has come under fire for using tear gas on migrants, a step the U.S. agency argued was justified because the migrants were allegedly rushing the border and attacking officers. Such tactics on the part of border agents, defenders of CBP noted, have been deployed under other administrations as well.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) on Friday said he hoped the girl’s death could humanize the immigration debate, while hitting the White House for slashing funding for programs intended to improve the quality of life in the countries where the migrant caravans are originating.

“This calls on all of us to bring a moral lens to this story, to look at how we're treating families, families with children, families who are coming to this country out of desperation,” he said in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“I think we should do everything we can to help make sure families don't feel compelled to make that risky trip, but once they do, Border Patrol needs to do everything they can to avoid this kind of senseless and needless loss of life, particularly for children who [arrrive] at our border in really terrible condition.”