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Vice President Mike Pence traveled to the US-Mexico border Friday to witness the conditions facing migrant adults and children in Customs and Border Protection custody.
Joined by a group of reporters, Senate Republicans and acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, Pence visited two facilities in the Rio Grande Valley: the Donna Processing Facility, temporarily housing families, and the McAllen Border Patrol Station, housing single adults who have been found crossing into the United States illegally.
In Donna, Pence saw oversized, air-conditioned facilities, with children and their parents lying on cots, watching animated movies and eating snacks.
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In McAllen, it was a much different scene: Pence toured a swelteringly hot room called a sally port with hundreds of men, a strong smell of sweat and overcrowding so extreme there was no room for cots, the migrants left to sleep on concrete beneath mylar blankets.
"The Vice President's office specifically instructed CBP to not clean up or sanitize the facility beyond what is routine so the American people could see how serious the crisis at our border is (overcrowding, lack of resources, beds)," an administration official said in an email, noting that there were Secret Service concerns over Pence entering the sally port, but the Vice President's office pushed for press access.
Asked by CNN whether the conditions for the detained single adult immigrants were acceptable, Pence said no.
"No, it's not. That's the reason why we demanded that Congress provide $4.6 billion in additional support to Customs and Border Protection,"the vice president said in an interview following both tours and a roundtable with Border Patrol officials. "The McAllen station, where our cells are overflowing ... ought to be a very clear message to every American that the time for action is now and the time for Congress to act to end the flow of families that are coming north from Central America to our border is now."
Now that we are rounding them up and incarcerating in contracted private prisons instead of the old catch and release we need to now spend money housing them instead of them going to work painting houses or whatever. There are a bunch of Mexicans pressure washing and painting a building next to me; I'm glad they're working and not in my county's jail or some concentration camp owned by the Hardees guy lol.
Congress needs to give the Federal government money to at least pay for better housing for some of these folks. This is every bit as bad as Japanese Concentration Camps in WW2. You would think that people would learn to stop making racially designated "detention" centers. The MiniTruth needs to call MiniPlenty and get the funds asap.
BUT the problem is that Democrats know 100% that the GOP will act in bad faith and just incarcerate more Mexicans and not improve conditions at all and this is just a ploy to put pressure on Congress to give them more money for war. We will see what happens when it is denied and he doesn't have someone to bail him out of this crisis of his own making. Maybe he can dig his dad up and ask to be bailed out again lol.
Dems need to draft their own bill designating specific funds for housing and quality of life for individuals incarcerated by the Federal Government who have committed no violent crimes, crimes against persons, or no serious crimes. Things aside from travelling. There are a lot of terrible actors who are using this opportunity to exploit and harm other humans and they should be policed as best as possible.
There has been literally no talk of addressing the actual problem of immigration, which is the legal immigration process is broken, so people going going in the back door, windows, cellar doors, etc. Literally no talk of one no work to address the problem, just the limitless reactive incarceration of brown people. They're worth more money to capitalists in prisons than in fields now lol. Solving this problem does nothing for the billionaire class and the government can only be trusted to solve problems in the interests of this group.
This post was edited by Skinned on Jul 13 2019 06:26am