Photo: Rep. Jackie Speier/Twitter
The memory was brief but vivid:
“The 1st sounds we heard before we could see the children held at Ursula were haunting cries of babies & toddlers,” Rep. Jackie Speier of Californiawrote on Twitter on Sunday.
She and more than a dozen other Democratic lawmakers had inspected the migrant processing center known as Ursula in McAllen, Texas, earlier that day. What they witnessed, she tells PEOPLE, was a scene of sickness and filth at one of several border sites that have come under scrutiny amid an ongoing furor about the conditions in which migrants are being held.
Congress recently passed a multi-billion-dollar aid bill while the president continues to demand Democratic lawmakers, who were swept to power in last year’s midterms, cede to his demands on tightening immigration law, which was one of his key campaign promises.
Speier, 69, says that among the children in Ursula center on Sunday was a boy, 8, who had been there alone for weeks after being taken from his 25-year-old sister.
“We saw mothers with infants and fathers with infants and small children, many of them listless, many were sick,” she tells PEOPLE. “They had this kind of vacant look on their faces.”
She also saw teen boys separated at the border from younger siblings who had no idea where their brothers and sisters were. They were disoriented from living in a place where the overhead lights never stopped shining.
“Imagine a facility where criminals in our federal prison system are treated better than they are — that a dog kennel like that would be shut down,” Speier says.
She recalls “the anguished faces,” she says.
“All those faces.”
Asked for comment, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees these facilities, referred PEOPLEto a tweet last weekfrom the agency:
Speier tells PEOPLE this was the first time House members were allowed to bring in their phones to the border facilities. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” she says of her tweets, which went viral, “and I wanted to give the American people a visual, raw look at what’s going on.”
“Why are we keeping this 16-year-old, with an infant, in a prison for all intents and purposes?” she says.
Speier’s account is one of many about the conditions inside the border facilities, which are typically kept from public view but have been opened up to Congress and the media amid the national controversy.
Several migrant children have died in government custody in the last year.
It costs an estimated $300 to $700 per day per migrant at these facilities. When asked where the money is going, Speier says the cost is for operators who are allowed to charge an “extraordinary amount.”
“It makes no sense when so many of these people have sponsors, why aren’t we processing them and allowing them to go to their sponsors?” Speier says, referring to people connected to migrants who essentially vouch for them in order for the migrant to leave government custody pending the outcome of their immigration cases.
“We expect them to pay their air travel or bus ticket,” Speier says. “And we can easily pay for their bus ticket with one day’s housing now spent on them, put an ankle monitor on them, give them a court date for their asylum hearing and stop running this massive inhumane operation.”
“The only way we are going to get accountability,” she continues, “is through the courts.”
Speier expects to introduce legislation in the next few weeks with some of her colleagues who visited the facilities to help provide improved health care for the migrants.
“These border patrol officers are not social workers and they are not health care providers,” she says, “and to give them that function is inappropriate.”
source: people.com
