Leila Ettachfini
""We thought, 'How can they deny it if it's not going to cost them anything?'" Dr. Julie Sierra told VICE."
Vice, November 22, 2019
Leila Ettachfini takes a look at the southern border and the heated controversies that surround it by detailing a personal account of a certain group's attempts in dealing with Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In an interview with Vice, Dr. Julie Sierra from Doctors for Camp Closure gives explanations and context in her communications with CBP regarding vaccination of migrants and asylum seekers. With the article's clear exigence being the recent flu-related deaths of three migrant children while under CBP custody, the author uses the interview with Dr. Sierra and statements from the CBP regarding its policy in order to expose the flaws in the CBP's system and place upon them the blame for the children's deaths. While the interview constitutes a majority of the article's content, the author carefully introduced Doctors for Camp Closure before selecting specific portions of the interview to include, mostly being details about the group's actions and motives. Much of the piece's argument lies entirely within the words of Dr. Sierra rather than the author, but Ettachfini still includes pieces of supporting numerical evidence in order to impact the context with which the audience will interpret the interview. Regardless of the audience's prior knowledge or preconceptions about the "border crisis" (either one of them), the author writes with precision, only presenting facts relevant to her argument while leaving the rest up to the audience's purposefully-influenced interpretation of the interview.
I was neither aware of the flu-related deaths of those three children nor the CBP's policy regarding medical care of persons under its custody. Now in mind, it seems that the border debate has yet another face to see. However, as seen in the statistics provided by the author, the aforementioned deaths seemed to be inconsistent with the CBP's past, and the 72-hour policy does not seem to be violated in any extreme fashion. The agency's policies are clearly exaggerated in the article, and little evidence is presented in the article that actually points to the CBP being consistently in violation of an ethical code regarding medical treatment of migrants and asylum seekers.
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