Jakelin Caal Maquín traveled from Guatemala for 2,000 miles before she reached the border. She left with her father from Raxruhá, a remote and poor Mayan Q’eqchi’ city; her family survived on $5 a day and lived in a straw-thatched house with dirt floors.

The day her father announced they would be trekking to the United States, she jumped up and down in excitement, her family said.

She crossed Mexico with a coyote, whom her family is now indebted to, probably facing the dangers smuggling brings: violence, harassment, harsh conditions and constant fear. She was also a young girl, on a route where between 60% and 80% of women and girls are raped or sexually assaulted.

She celebrated her seventh birthday on the road.

Yet she survived it. She crossed the border in New Mexico in a group of 163 and was quickly detained by Customs and Border Protection on 6 December.

She was dead 48 hours later. Her temperature had reached 105.7 degrees. She suffered two heart attacks, vomited and stopped breathing. Her brain swelled and her liver failed. She died in an El Paso hospital.

It took a week for CBP to release details of her death. Blame was immediately put on her father, Nery Gilberto Caal Cruz. Kirstjen Nielsen, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, said the pair should not have crossed the border. “This family chose to cross illegally,” she said. “I cannot stress enough how dangerous this journey is when migrants choose to come here illegally.”

The White House also took no responsibility, instead blaming Cruz for his daughter’s death.

These are the architects of a system that routinely leaves immigrants no option but to cross through the desert

These are the architects of a system that routinely leaves immigrants no option but to cross through the desert. The alternative? A clogged port of entry like in Tijuana, where there are more than 5,000 people waiting to begin the asylum process, stuck in a city with soaring crime rates that is especially dangerous for women and children.

Delays await migrants entering at any designated port of entry: Nogales, Santa Teresa, El Paso, Laredo, etc.

They are the architects of a system that puts migrants in hieleras — “ice boxes” where people are often separated from family members and forced to sleep for days on a concrete floor, a Mylar blanket their only warmth. On a recent trip I made to Karnes detention center in Texas, one migrant father told me, with tears in his eyes, that the hielera was the most distressing part of his journey. He thought of them constantly, fear and trauma in his mind.

Just yesterday, a five-month-old girl was hospitalized with pneumonia after her time in hieleras. She had been held for five days in freezing rooms, without medication, and began vomiting after her release. She had reached a temperature of 102.7, deadly for an infant.

They are the architects of a system where border agents patrol the desert and slash open water jugs and destroy food and blankets that others have left behind for those who find themselves thirsty, hungry and exposed. Records are scant, but the United Nations estimated that 412 migrants died in the desert in 2017, an increase from the previous year.

Death in such a system is no accident. An immigration system that restricts legal entry and then ensures dehydration and detention for those who cross otherwise will naturally have fatal results. In fact, the system is intended to heighten these dangers and then broadcast them to those who would follow. The deaths themselves are the deterrent.

This isn’t hidden. The day after news of her death was reported, former congressman Jason Chaffetz said Jakelin should not have tried immigrating and that others should take heed of her fate. “That should be the message,” he said. “Don’t make this journey, it will kill you.”

Yet officials like Chaffetz have created our complex and adversarial system, which tips the scales of a terrible choice: wait the months it will take to be processed for asylum, with no guarantee you will pass the border entry interview, or suffer the dangers of the desert and skip the line. No one gladly chooses the latter.

The predictable and preventable result was the death of Jakelin. It’s meant the deaths of 74 people in immigration detention centers since 2010. It will probably mean the deaths of many more in the years to come.

Heads must roll for this. Congress should launch a full investigation into Jakelin’s death, as had been demanded. It must ask why the CBP commissioner, Kevin McAleenan, withheld news of her death when he testified to Congress earlier in the week. It must receive a full accounting of the final moments of Jakelin’s death and the services she received, especially since we know there’s a pattern of substandard medical care in immigration facilities.

Most important, we must overhaul our intake process completely. We can no longer clog ports of entry, arbitrarily deny fair asylum hearings, push people to desert crossings and then mistreat them when they cross. The hieleras must be abolished, the long lines must end, the destruction of supplies must end.

Our system is set up to ensure these deaths, but it need not be this way. A different system would treat migrants with dignity and ensure their safe passage, preventing deaths like Jakelin’s. Instead, it’s set up to amplify them as deterrence for any who would dream of coming to our country.