It was two in the morning when Paul Wise got the call: An 8-year-old girl from Panama had died in U.S. Border Patrol custody in Harlingen, Texas. Wise was on vacation in Portugal when his extra cell phone rang, the one he always keeps with him in case of emergencies concerning the care and treatment of migrant children detained at the U.S. border. This was the type of call he most feared.

“I was on the next plane to the Rio Grande Valley,” says Wise, a Stanford professor of pediatrics and of health policy who was serving as the juvenile care monitor for the Border Patrol facilities there. He arrived 48 hours later to participate in the investigation of the death of Anadith Danay Reyes Alvarez on May 17, 2023, her ninth day in custody. 

Wise is soft-spoken, a good listener, perhaps from more than 50 years of leaning in to hear the voices of sick children. But on the U.S. border with Mexico—a subject of constant policy debate, where the major-party candidates for president made dueling visits on the same day in February—his voice has broken through. 

For more than four years, he has served as a court-appointed medical expert in two Border Patrol sectors in Texas, where he has monitored conditions, written reports, and made recommendations to ensure appropriate care and safety for migrant children in U.S. custody. “He has probably saved more children’s lives at the southern border than anybody,” says Nancy Ewen Wang, a Stanford professor of emergency medicine and the medical adviser to the new juvenile care monitor. (Wise, who is on sabbatical, has stepped down as monitor and returned to an advisory role.)

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