Homestead, FL –Reps. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-FL) and Veronica Escobar (D-TX) held a press conference shortly after touring the Homestead immigrant detention facility this past weekend, describing the immigrant living conditions they saw, before casting blame on the Trump administration for the current humanitarian border crisis along the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
This was Rep. Mucarsel-Powell’s 7th trip to the children’s detention center, the same facility where she has been turned away on several other occasions.
Mucarsel-Powell told reporters that even though fewer children are being housed there, “nothing has changed” in regards to the conditions in which the detainees are kept.
Mucarsel-Powell says that many of the children she spoke to “are scared” to open up about their situation, emphasizing her goal to “shut down the facility.”
“Every time I leave as disturbed as my first visit. It never gets easier for me.”-Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell
“The only difference is the amount of kids being detained,” said Mucarsel-Powell “We are holding kids in a prison-like facility. None of you would want to send your children to this facility as a summer camp”
Immediately after Mucarsel-Powell made her remarks, Texas Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, who represents the El Paso area, focused her remarks on blaming the Trump administration for the current immigration crisis along the border with Mexico.
Rep. Escobar said that the Trump administration was “creating unaccompanied minors” when it separates families at the border, creating more illegal aliens because when a family is separated, it creates individual adult migrants and individual youth migrant.
Escobar then blamed the “crisis” on the “American government” and detention center overpopulation, saying that other “countries with fewer resources” were doing a “much better” job managing migrants than the U.S.
“This crisis is a crisis at the hands of the American government,” said Escobar “We are able to handle and process people. We should be able to do this. Countries with fewer resources are able to do it much better than the American government is able to do it right now.”
Just as she blamed President Trump for the border crisis, Escobar then complained about blaming “people” for the immigration crisis, saying that the U.S. and other countries need to work together “as hemisphere” to deal with the migration problem.
“Mexico has cracked down on migrants. Here is the problem with looking at migration as a threat. We are trying to blame people instead of working together as a hemisphere to fix the migration problem.”
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