WASHINGTON – U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Patty Murray (D-WA), and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the top Democrats with jurisdiction over the government’s handling of migrant children, today pressed U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar for information following last week’s acknowledgment that a 10-year-old girl from El Salvador died in the agency’s custody on September 29, 2018. This was the first death of a migrant child in federal custody since 2010, and the first of six deaths of migrant children in the last eight months of the Trump Administration.
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“While HHS must protect the privacy of the children in your custody, your agency also has a responsibility to be accountable and transparent to Congress and the American people,” the Senators wrote in a letter to Secretary Azar.
In their letter, the Senators pressed Secretary Azar for information on the child’s death, including how he and other senior HHS officials responded to the death and the results of any investigation into the death, as well as asking him to commit that the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) will request an Inspector General investigation and notify Congress of the death of any unaccompanied child in ORR custody within 24 hours of the death and notify the public within one hour thereafter.
