Dead Guatemalan girl dreamed of sending money home to poor family

Young journalists club

News ID: 32886
Publish Date: 8:56 - 16 December 2018
TEHRAN, December 16 -The 7-year-old Guatemalan migrant girl who died after being detained by U.S. border agents this month was inseparable from her father and had looked forward to being able to send money home to support her impoverished family, relatives said on Saturday.

Dead Guatemalan girl dreamed of sending money home to poor familyTEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -The 7-year-old Guatemalan migrant girl who died after being detained by U.S. border agents this month was inseparable from her father and had looked forward to being able to send money home to support her impoverished family, relatives said on Saturday. 

Nery Caal, 29, and his daughter Jakelin were in a group of more than 160 migrants who handed themselves in to U.S. border agents in New Mexico on Dec. 6. Jakelin developed a high fever while in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and died two days later at a hospital in El Paso, Texas.

“The girl said when she was grown up she was going to work and send dough back to her mom and grandma,” said her mother Claudia Maquin, who has three remaining children, speaking in the Mayan language Q’eqchi and betraying little outward emotion.

“Because she’d never seen a big country, she was really happy that she was going to go,” she added, explaining how her husband had gone to the United States to find a way out of the “extreme poverty” that dictated their lives.

Source: Reuters

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