The February death of an newborn baby whose mother was an Angolan migrant picked up near Lukeville, Ariz., is being reviewed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

CBP officials said the Office of Professional Responsibility is reviewing the incident, and the Office of Inspector General with the Department of Homeland Security was notified after a mother from Angola, in Southwest Africa, was transported to a Phoenix-area hospital after she was taken into custody near Lukeville, Ariz., on February 25.

Around 2:14 p.m. that day, Border Patrol agents from the Ajo Station encountered a group of 12 migrants around 12 miles west of the Lukeville border crossing, about 110 miles southwest of Tucson. Among the group was a pregnant woman. Agents said she did not speak English, but was communicating “what they believed was French,” CBP officials said as they released information about the incident Tuesday.

Agents picked her up and drove her to the Ajo Station, about 28 miles north of Lukeville on State Route 85. According to CBP officials, she arrived at the station at 2:55 p.m. 

About 20 minutes later, as the woman was booked into custody, an on-site nurse practitioner working under a CBP contract evaluated the woman, and noted she complained of abdominal pain, cramping and back pain. The NP reported the woman was around eight months pregnant. The woman denied taking medications, and told officials she had two previous miscarriages, CBP officials said.

CBP officials said the pregnant woman said it had been three months since her last prenatal visit with an obstetrician. With this information, the nurse practitioner “requested the woman be transported via ambulance to a hospital for further evaluation and care.”

Around 3:33 p.m., Ajo Ambulance Services arrived at the Ajo Station, and just 15 minutes later, the ambulance began to take her to Abrazo Hospital West Campus in Goodyear, Ariz., about 100 miles away, arriving there at approximately 5:34 p.m., CBP officials said.

A Federal Protective Services inspector — an agent normally assigned to protect federal installations — was assigned to hospital watch and followed the ambulance in a government vehicle, CBP officials said.

Around 1:45 a.m., the FPS inspector contacted Ajo Station BP agents and said the woman underwent an emergency cesarean section after a doctor detected a defect in the fetus’ heartbeat. After the procedure, the newborn’s heartbeat was “low and decreasing” and medical staff struggled with the baby’s heart rate. They attempted to resuscitate the newborn for nearly an hour. At about 2:45 a.m., medical staff declared the newborn had died.

The Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office performed an autopsy on February 27, and the results are currently pending, CBP officials said Tuesday.

Border Patrol agents in the Tucson Sector, which covers much of Arizona from the Yuma County line to the New Mexico border, encountered people 49,451 in February. During that week, Tucson Sector agents had 11,800 encounters, according to the Tucson Sector Chief John R. Modlin, who regularly posts “week in review” figures on Twitter.

Since mid-September 2023, the remote desert west of Lukeville has been a major crossing point for migrants. While the Trump administration installed 30-foot steel barriers along the southern edge of the 330,000-acre national refuge, thousands of migrants have crossed using either open floodgates or squeezing through gaps cut in the 6-inch wide steel “bollards” by smugglers using battery-powered tools. On Nov. 28, 2023, nearly 750 people lingered in a double-file line along the border road in the wilderness. Among the group were families from Ecuador and the Dominican Republic, as well as men and women from Senegal, Kenya, Guinea-Bissau, and South Africa. A small group of Sikhs from India also waited in the desert, along with a man from Nepal.

CBP officials are required under a 2021 appropriations law to report deaths in DHS custody, part of an overhaul of the agency’s guidelines
following an incident in December 2018 when 7-year-old Jakelin Amei Rosmery
Caal Maquin died in Border Patrol custody. The girl died at the Border
Patrol station after crossing into the U.S. with her father near a
forward operating base in the bootheel of New Mexico near the Antelope
Wells Port of Entry, a remote and lonely stretch of terrain south of
Interstate 10.

Among thousands of people, some migrants suffer from serious medical
issues even before they cross into the U.S. The agency has pushed to
train medical personnel, and expanded the agency’s Border Search Trauma
and Rescue unit, or BORSTAR, but nonetheless some migrants have died
even as agents provided significant medical care.

In March, CBP released a report detailing in-custody deaths for the fiscal year of 2022, which ran from October 2021 through September 2022. That year, OPR reviewed the deaths of 171 people, officials said.

Last September, an infant girl died at the Nogales Border Patrol station after an agent found her 16-year-old mother carrying her along the border around 2 a.m. in the morning. The agent struggled to understand the girl and rushed her and her baby to the station where medical personnel — including three nurse practitioners and three emergency medical technicians — attempted to save the infant’s life. 

OPR reviewed that incident as well, but a report has not been released to the public.