While the Biden administration is still denying there is a crisis at the border, a “staggering number” of illegal immigrant minors detained at a Border Patrol facility in Texas are struggling with “overcrowded conditions,” with children sleeping on floors, going hungry, and going a week without showering, according to a report from CBS News. The facility in Donna, Texas, designed for 250 migrants, is now holding over 1,800 people, a staggering 729 percent of its capacity.
The Donna facility, which opened last month, has been operating over its pandemic-era capacity for weeks, CBP acknowledged in a recent filing in federal court. The facility was holding 854 children on February 21 and nearly 700 two days before, according to the court filing, which also noted that social distancing “could not be observed at all times given the increasing numbers of individuals in custody.”
The children interviewed included a young teenager in U.S. custody with her baby and an 8-year-old unaccompanied girl. Some of the children who traveled with older siblings were even younger, [Neha Desai, a lawyer representing migrant youth in U.S. government custody] said.
“There was a staggering amount of very young children,” she said.
But at least there are no more mean tweets, right?
According to Desai, many of the children reported they were not allowed to go outside for activities, and that children told her “about how they never saw the sun.”
“One of them shared that he could only see the sun when he showered, because you can see the sun through the window,” Desai said, noting the children raised this issue during their interviews outside the CBP facility.
The minors Desai spoke to also said they had been denied phone calls to communicate with family members. “They were hysterically crying, wanting to talk to their family,” she said.
It gets worse. According to Desai, “Multiple kids said the exact same sentence: ‘the only time I get up is to throw away trash or go to the bathroom.'”
Nevertheless, Desai seems to partially excuse the Biden-created border crisis. “We appreciate the extraordinary challenge that the government faces in undoing the damage of the prior administration’s immigration policies. That said, it is deeply concerning to see young children in facilities for days on end, unable to take a shower, call their families or see the sunlight.”
Sounds worse than prison conditions to me, like the Biden administration is keeping immigrant children in cages. But, you know, Orange Man bad! In fact, we should be grateful that Trump’s cages have been rebranded as Biden’s “migrant facilities,” because that means the Biden administration can pretend there isn’t a crisis at all, and the far-left can pretend that packing kids in overcrowded “migrant facilities,” where they are going hungry, sleep on the floor, and don’t get to go outside, is humane compared to Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, which resulted in a decline of illegal border crossing, meaning more kids were safe at home with their families in their home countries.
CBS notes that “The lack of bed space and upward trend of unaccompanied minors entering U.S. custody has led to a logjam of migrant minors in Border Patrol facilities, most of which were built to briefly detain adult men” and that nearly 9,500 unaccompanied children were taken into U.S. border custody in February, a 21-month high.”
Illegal border crossings plummeted during the Trump administration—an undeniable result of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy for illegal immigrants. The border wall also proved to be successful in blocking illegal crossings. Illegal border crossing have skyrocketed to six times what the Obama administration deemed crisis-level since immigrants started heading to the United States’ southern border after the election, believing Biden would deliver on amnesty.
It doesn’t seem all that long ago that the delusional left thought Biden was going to make things better for immigrants. “My son just hugged me and said ‘mommy no more kids in cages!'” claimed singer/actress Idina Menzel after the media declared Joe Biden the winner in the 2020 election in a since-deleted tweet. Her story about her son probably never happened, but the tweet appears to have been deleted only in the past three weeks.
Gee, I wonder why.
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Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter, Gab, Facebook, MeWe, Heroes, Rumble, and CloutHub.
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