Mariee Juárez seemed to be in perfect health when she and her mother were detained after they illegally crossed the United States border in March.

But when they were released from custody three weeks later, the child had a severe infection that would lead to her death less than two months later. She was 20 months old.

On Tuesday, her mother, Yazmin Juárez, 21, filed a legal claim against the United States government seeking $60 million for the child’s wrongful death.

Ms. Juárez alleges neglect at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which she said provided “inadequate, substandard medical care” to her daughter at the “unsafe and unsanitary” South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Tex., according to the complaint.

“The United States government puts small children in jail to achieve a policy objective of ending unlawful immigration, and that has consequences,” said R. Stanton Jones, a lawyer for Ms. Juárez, who declined to comment. “A lot of people for a long time have believed one of the consequences of this family detention policy would be the death of a child, and that is what happened here.”

Mr. Jones said Ms. Juárez and her daughter were detained by Border Patrol agents almost immediately after they crossed the Rio Grande on a raft in March. They were held at a Customs and Border Protection processing center in McAllen, Tex., for three or four days, he said, where they slept on the floor of a locked cage with over two dozen other people, before being transferred to the facility in Dilley.

According to the complaint, Ms. Juárez said her daughter was in good health when they left McAllen but fell ill soon after they arrived in Dilley, where they were held in a room with 10 other people, five women who each had a child.

Several of the children were sick, and within a week, Mariee began to cough and develop upper-respiratory congestion, the complaint said. Over the next three weeks, her fever climbed to 104.2, she suffered extensive vomiting and diarrhea, and she lost nearly 8 percent of her body weight.

During that time, the child received treatment from at least five different medical workers, only one of whom was a physician, and was given at least four different diagnoses, the complaint said. Ms. Juárez was told to give her daughter seven different medications, including one — Vicks VapoRub — that is labeled inappropriate for children under the age of 2.

The legal complaint filed on Tuesday also names the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and the Department of Health and Human Services, none of which responded to messages seeking comment on Wednesday.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to comment on Ms. Juárez’s case, citing pending litigation. But the agency said in a statement that it “takes very seriously the health, safety and welfare of those in our care.”

“ICE is committed to ensuring the welfare of all those in the agency’s custody, including providing access to necessary and appropriate medical care,” the statement said, adding that the agency spends $250 million each year to provide “comprehensive medical care” to detainees in its custody.

The agency also pointed to a June 2017 report from the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, which said the agency’s family detention facilities were “clean, well-organized and efficiently run.”

The report praised the agency for “addressing the inherent challenges of providing medical care and language services and ensuring the safety of families in detention.”

Ms. Juárez and her daughter were released from the detention center in Dilley shortly after officials determined there was a credible basis for her asylum claim.

Mariee was not examined by medical personnel before she and her mother left the facility, but an ICE medical report obtained by Ms. Juárez falsely said that she had been, according to the legal claim. That report failed to note any of the child’s symptoms and said a “licensed vocational nurse” had “medically cleared” her for release.

Ms. Juárez and Mariee went directly from the detention center to San Antonio International Airport, where they boarded a flight to New Jersey. Shortly after they landed, the child was admitted to JFK Medical Center in Edison, N.J.

Tests showed she had bacterial pneumonia, adenovirus and parainfluenza, and she was later moved to two different hospitals, Jersey Shore University Medical Center, in Neptune, N.J., and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, for increasingly specialized care. She died at Children’s Hospital on May 10 after experiencing a catastrophic intrathoracic hemorrhage that caused irreversible brain and organ damage.

“Yazmin feared for her own life and safety and also the life and safety of her daughter, Mariee, in Guatemala, and that is why they fled to seek asylum in the United States,” Mr. Jones said. “She has experienced more hardship and tragedy than most people probably will in a long life.”

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