A YOUNG Guatemalan girl who died after she and her father were detained by U.S. border agents was in no medical distress when they arrived and had received adequate food and water on their journey, relatives said Saturday through representatives in Texas.

A statement from the family of 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin, released to reporters in El Paso, Texas, by the head of a migrants shelter where her father was staying, disputed media reports that the girl had gone days without food or water and become dehydrated while traveling from Guatemala through Mexico to the U.S. border.

News of the child’s death, and suggestions that border officials ignored or overlooked a medical crisis, added to criticism from migrant advocates and congressional Democrats of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies.

But neither the father nor other family members cast blame on U.S. border authorities in their first statements about the tragedy.

Ruben Garcia, director of the Annunciation House shelter, said the girl’s father, Nery Caal, 29, told him he had no inkling his daughter was ill when they arrived by bus with dozens of other migrants at the U.S. border in Antelope Wells, New Mexico, on the night of Dec. 6.

Garcia also said the father agreed with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) account of the father and daughter’s brief detention, including CBP’s assertion there was no indication that the girl had been suffering from any medical problem until several hours after their arrival.

“Jakelin had not been crossing the desert for days,” her family wrote in the English-language statement.

“She and her father sought asylum from Border Patrol as soon as they crossed the border,” the statement said. “She had not suffered from a lack of water or food prior to approaching the border.”

According to CBP’s account, the girl and her father also had access to water and restrooms during the seven hours they waited to board a CBP bus that would take them Dec. 7 from Antelope Wells to another Border Patrol station at Lordsburg, about 153 km away.

The CBP said Nery Caal told agents just before their bus departed that his daughter was vomiting, and by the time they arrived 90 minutes later she had stopped breathing.

(SD-Agencies)