Texas facility resumes intake of migrants after flu outbreak

May 22, 2019

A facility for migrants in McAllen, Texas, has resumed normal operations Wednesday, less than 24 hours after the facility suspended intake operations after 32 people testified positive for the flu. The U.S. Border Patrol said the facility had been sterilized and they had conducted medical assessments of all individuals.

Individuals diagnosed with the flu were either treated on site or brought to local hospitals, Border Patrol said. The facility in McAllen holds hundreds of parents and children at a time in a converted warehouse.

CBS News has confirmed the Centralized Processing Center is the same facility where a 16-year-old who later died had been diagnosed with the flu. After being diagnosed with the flu at the facility, Carlos Hernandez Vasquez, from Guatemala, was transferred to a smaller Border Patrol station, where he was found unresponsive Monday.

Federal officials confirmed on Wednesday that a 10-year-old girl from El Salvador had died at a facility in September 2018, the sixth confirmed death of a migrant child in the past eight months.

The other four children who died were either detained by Border Patrol, or released by the agency to a hospital. On May 14, a a 2 ½-year-old died after being apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso.

The next most recent recorded death was on April 30. In that case, another 16-year-old, Juan de León Gutiérrez, was sent to Southwest Key Casa Padre, a Brownsville, Texas, facility. He died nine days later in a hospital bed.

On Christmas Eve last year, an 8-year-old boy, Felipe Gómez Alonzo, died from the flu. And on Dec. 8, 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin, died of a bacterial infection.