A Democratic congressional delegation visited the El Paso detention center, where according to them, the detainees were being held in subpar conditions, and in the words of one member of congress, female detainees were told to drink water from the toilet.
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Veronica Escobar, Sylvia Garcia, Joaquin Castor, and about half a dozen more House member held a press conference shortly after their “camp” visit.
Protestors were on hand for the joint congressional address, and were heard shouting down just about all the members that spoke, yelling racial and religious slurs.
Thank you @RepRashida for standing strong under such awful slurs. The power of your words as well as those of @RepPressley inspire all of us to continue to fight for our American values. Thank you for coming to my community to bear witness❤️ https://t.co/AJoX9EbvlC
— Rep. Veronica Escobar (@RepEscobar) July 2, 2019
Rep. Escobar, who like Ocasio-Cortez, admonished CBP agents and the detention facilities, also confirmed that she was heard yelling at the local head of the El Paso Border Patrol chief Aaron Hull.
“Anyhow, yes, yes I did,” said Escobar
Rep.Ocasio-Cortez, who referred to detention centers as “concentration camps,” stated that she heard that a female detainee was told to drink from the toilet, and that Border Patrol agents were mocking them.
Ocasio-Cortez’s claims that the conditions inside the facilities were deplorable, and that detainees were having the human rights violated, were quickly questioned and countered by a group of Christian pastors.
Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the world's largest Hispanic Christian organization, took issue with Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks and the reports coming out from the detention centers.
“I read the reports, saw the news clips. I just wanted to see what was actually happening in order to better enable our efforts to find a fair and a just solution to our broken immigration system," Rodriguez, who has advised President Trump and both Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush on immigration reform, noted. “To my surprise, I saw something drastically different from the stories I’ve been hearing in our national discourse. Even as a veteran of immigration advocacy in the U.S., I was shocked at the misinformation of the crisis at the border."
“We found no soiled diapers, no deplorable conditions and no lack of basic necessities,” Rodriguez remarked, adding he specifically asked border agents if they staged the facility in response to the negative press. “They unequivocally denied it — we were witnessing the identical conditions the attorneys saw when they toured the facility days earlier."-Fox News
CBP Director Brian Hastings debunked the negative claims, saying that his agency provides "fresh water" and "clean facilities" among to her things.
