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Visiting Migrant Facilities, Ocasio-Cortez And Pressley Face Down Trumpists

Visiting Migrant Facilities, Ocasio-Cortez And Pressley Face Down Trumpists

A group of Democratic members of Congress visited U.S. facilities detaining migrants on Monday, confirming reports that the detention centers exhibit abusive conditions and widespread mistreatment of the adults and children forced to live in them.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) detailed much of the abominable state of the facilities on Twitter, including the devastating discovery that agents were telling migrants to drink out of toilets. Children were quarantined when sick, families continued to be separated, and the migrants were overcrowded in cramped cells, the lawmakers reported.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), too, visited the camps and delivered a passionate speech along with the others denouncing the conditions outside of a Clint, Texas, location. Pro-Trump protesters showed up to scream at the Democratic women. When Pressley spoke, she was undeterred by their taunts.

“Keep yelling!” she said. “This is very appropriate! Vile rhetoric for vile actions!”

She continued: “This is about the preservation of our humanity. And this is about seeing every person there as a member of your own family. I am tired of the health and the safety, the humanity, and the full freedom of black and brown children being negotiated and compromised and moderated.”

Official Says Migrant Kids Will Be Returned To Border Detention Center

Official Says Migrant Kids Will Be Returned To Border Detention Center

In a Tuesday call with reporters, a Trump official said 100 children have been sent back to a border detention facility so horrendous one doctor compared the conditions to “torture facilities.”

According to the New York Times, a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official also told reporters on the call, “I personally don’t believe these allegations.”

But those allegations arose from visits to two facilities by lawyers for the children being detained, as well as a board-certified physician. According to interviews with dozens of children being detained, kids were being fed uncooked frozen food, forced to sleep on concrete floors, and had not had showers in weeks.

In one instance, lawyers saw a “2-year-old boy, he wasn’t wearing a diaper and had wet his pants, and his shirt was smeared in mucus.” Three children, aged 10 to 15, took turns looking after the toddler because no one else was there to do it, according to accounts given to the Associated Press.

Dolly Lucio Sevier, the physician, wrote that the conditions “could be compared to torture facilities.”

“I can’t imagine my child being there and not being broken,” she told ABC News.

After the reports emerged, the Trump administration removed all but 30 children from the Clint Border Patrol station, one of the facilities visited by the doctor and lawyers.

“Children do not belong in detention,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX), who represents the area near the Clint detention facility, said at the time. Trump’s policies “are only harming children and promoting needless and cruel family separation,” she added. “This must end.”

But instead of ending the cruelty, Trump officials are returning children to the same facility where they experienced such deplorable conditions.

Published with permission of The American Independent.