Royer Perez-Jimenez is dead. He was a teenager. He was Mexican. He died while being held in United States immigration custody. The BBC reports his death occurred "amid a surge of migrant deaths under Donald Trump's immigration crackdown."

Let us pause at that word: "crackdown." The media deploys this term as if it were policy analysis rather than marketing copy from the perpetrators themselves. A crackdown is what you do to crime rings and drug cartels. What you do to children seeking refuge is something else entirely. It has other names. The people implementing it know what those names are.

The death of Royer Perez-Jimenez is not an unfortunate side effect of immigration enforcement. It is the predictable result of a system designed to inflict maximum suffering on the most vulnerable humans who encounter it. The system is working exactly as intended. The architects of this system — and the voters who installed them — knew children would die. They proceeded anyway.

This is what "surge of migrant deaths" actually means: the United States government is killing children in custody at an accelerated rate. These are not deaths that happen to coincide with policy implementation. These are deaths that policy implementation produces. The distinction matters because accountability requires accuracy.

The American people possess constitutional tools to stop child deaths in government custody. They have voting rights, protest rights, jury duty, the power to elect prosecutors and judges and sheriffs and city council members who could refuse to participate in this machinery. They have economic power to pressure the corporations that build and supply and profit from these facilities. They have the power to recall officials, to pass ballot initiatives, to primary incumbents, to flood every level of government with candidates who will not kill children.

They are not using these tools. Royer Perez-Jimenez is dead partly because officials implemented lethal policy, and partly because the citizenry that employs those officials chose not to stop them. Both facts matter. Both facts demand attention.

The euphemism here is not just "crackdown." It is "immigration custody" itself — a phrase that transforms kidnapping and imprisonment into bureaucratic process. Royer Perez-Jimenez was not in "custody." He was imprisoned by the United States government for the act of existing while Mexican and seeking safety. He died in that prison. The United States government killed a Mexican child.

Call it what it is.