Democratic Senators Blame Trump for Abysmal Border Facility Conditions After Tour

By David Boddiger | July 20, 2019 | 7:38pm

Immigration

A dozen Democratic senators led by Senate Minority Leader
Chuck Schumer called for an end on Friday to the Trump administration’s
inhumane policies toward migrants held in substandard and overcrowded conditions
at detention facilities along the border.

After touring a Customs and Border Protection detention
facility and other sites in McAllen, Texas, Schumer called the treatment of
detained migrants “heart-wrenching.”

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“This is wrong. This is not who
we are. This has to end. Now,” Schumer tweeted after the tour.

“The damn shame of it all is that all comes from the top. If
the policy-making from the top changes, there could many more facilities like
the Catholic charities facility we saw, which was really not great, but
certainly decent, rather than the facilities like this, where it’s just awful,
awful, awful to see how these people are being treated,” Schumer said at a
press conference later.

According to Schumer, about 400 detained migrants were removed from the border facility in the days ahead of the senators’ visit to “make things look better,” HuffPost reported.

Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who said he first saw children
in cages as a result of Trump’s child separation policies over a year ago, said
the underlying cause “is a philosophy [by] this administration of inflicting
trauma on refugees and trauma on children as a strategy of deterrence.” He
called that strategy “un-American.”

“It is not supportable under any moral code, under any set
of ethics, under any religion, and it has to end. Child separation is still taking
place at some level—not to the degree it was, but it’s still taking place,” he
added.

Merkley said he met with one mother being detained with her
son after fleeing Honduras when MS-13 gang members killed her grandfather and
threatened to kill her. “When they had no more money, they fled for their
life,” Merkley tweeted.

The Oregon senator shared photos showing the
overcrowding at the facility, in which migrants are seen sprawled on the
floor behind chain-link cages, some caring for toddlers.

Sen. Dick Durbin from Illinois said, “You can’t walk into
this building and see children, and the situation that these children are in,
and believe that it would be better for them and better for America for them to
stay in detention in these cages for a longer period of time.”

Next week, when the senators return to Washington, Durbin
said they would begin debating in the Senate Judiciary Committee various proposals
for immigration reform.

Sen. Jacky
Rosen from Nevada said, “This culture of cruelty has to stop. We have to
remember our humanity.”

Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey noted that the delegation
pressed CBP officials about Trump’s constant fearmongering statements about asylum-seekers
and other undocumented migrants. “When we pressed CBP today, over 98% of all of
these people are not criminals,” Menendez said. “That should be said time and
time again. Because the president would have us believe that we are being
besieged by those who are criminals. Their own admission was 98% were not.”

Schumer proposed that asylum-seekers should be allowed to
apply in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said, “What we saw
today was a continuing humanitarian crisis that is on the conscience of the
American people and ought to shock the conscience of the American people.”

He added, “It is a humanitarian
crisis of Donald Trump’s making.”

Blumenthal said that a bill Congress passed in June to
provide $4.6
billion in emergency funding for the border—without the protections for
migrants sought by progressive House
Democrats—had helped improved the situation slightly. But he added that
comprehensive immigration reform is needed to correct a system he described as
fundamentally “broken.”

The senators called for passage of a bill proposed by
Merkley and others, the Stop Cruelty to Migrant Children Act, which would “reform
how children fleeing persecution are treated between the moment at which they
arrive at our borders to claim asylum and the ultimate resolution of their
asylum case,” according to a statement
from Merkley’s office.

Last week, Vice President Mike Pence, Lindsey Graham, and
other Republican senators toured
two migrant detention centers in Texas, and had a very different reaction than
their Democratic colleagues. At one facility in McAllen, some 400 men were
stuffed behind caged fences without room to lie down. According to journalist
reports, a “stench from body odor hung stale in the air.”

Pence was seen on video clearly disturbed by what he was
witnessing, although he did not denounce the conditions, instead praising the
efforts of border officials.

On Friday, Blumenthal remarked that, “I think that what
we’ve seen here is going to haunt us for a long time to come.”