CNN
By Maegan Vazquez
June 04, 2018
A Democratic senator is accusing the Trump administration of being part of a “cruel” effort against unauthorized immigrant children after he was denied entry to a Texas immigration center for unaccompanied minors when he showed up asking for a tour of the facility.
Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley — who acknowledged that he had been told in advance he wouldn’t be admitted to the facility — told CNN’s “New Day” Monday morning that he believes President Donald Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Department of Homeland Security “do not want members of Congress or the public to know what’s going on” in the center.
“It’s damaging to children, putting them through a horrific experience in a land where they know no one and they don’t know where they’re being sent and don’t understand why they’re being sent just as a way to be, if you will, cruel as a strategy of deterrence, not deterrence from people crossing the border, deterrence from people seeking asylum,” Merkley said.
CNN has reached out to both the White House and the Administration for Children and Families, a part of the Department of Health and Human Services, for comment.
Merkley told CNN that when his team called to request a tour of the center where “upwards of 1,000 children are being held,” they were told that it was the facility’s policy not to admit anyone.
“My team conveyed that I was going down to visit the border and see what was going on and I would try to come by and visit and hope that they rethought their position but obviously they didn’t,” he added.
The Brownsville, Texas, facility, which is housed inside a former Walmart, is owned by Southwest Key Programs, a private nonprofit that contracts with the government to run shelters that house unaccompanied immigrant children. Southwest Key Programs did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment. The organization’s website says it runs 27 immigrant children’s shelters in Texas, Arizona and California.
Despite being denied a tour, Merkley and others on the trip with him showed up to the facility anyway.
A video posted to Merkley’s Facebook page shows the senator and individuals with cameras approaching the facility. When they arrive, they encounter a staff member entering the center, who says the group needs to vacate the premises because it’s private property.
After calling a phone number associated with the facility twice and being told that a manager will speak with him, Merkley encounters police and a manager who says to call a Washington, DC-area phone number to the facility’s contractor for a statement. He is then told to leave the premises.
In a viral tweet posted Sunday, Merkley is photographed speaking with a police officer outside the facility where he filmed.
“I was barred entry. Asked repeatedly to speak to a supervisor—he finally came out and said he can’t tell us anything. Police were called on us,” Merkley tweeted. “Children should never be ripped from their families & held in secretive detention centers.”
Merkley’s visit to the US-Mexico border was a response to a new policy of the administration to refer all people who cross the border illegally for criminal prosecution on top of immigration proceedings — a policy that will result in the separations of families who cross illegally as the adults are put into the criminal justice system.
On another leg of his tour in the McAllen area, Merkley claimed he saw children in “cages” similar to those in a 2014 image recently circulated across social media — people sleeping on concrete floors, wire fencing, with only thin “space blankets” as to cover them.
“Yesterday morning at the McAllen Border Station, at the processing center, they have big cages made out of fencing and wire and nets stretched across the top of them so people can’t climb out of them,” the senator said. “Every time I probed yesterday on the circumstances (of why they were held this way) the response was just basically a generic, ‘That is what’s required for security, this is what is required for control.'”
The senator told CNN on Monday that he hopes to hold hearings on the matter.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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