-Critics have not been shy about denouncing conditions
for children at Customs and Border Protection
holding facilities along the US-Mexico border.
-[chanting] Close the camps!
-When do we want it? -Now!
-We're lifting up these stories in the hopes
that you will see the light!
-[chanting, clapping] No camps!
-Close the camps!
-What we saw today was unconscionable.
-But President Trump says his administration
is doing a better job than Obama's.
-And they're much better than they were under President
Obama, by far.
It's in much better shape than it ever was.
-So, are conditions at holding facilities better now
than they were under Obama?
To start, we need to understand what happens
when an unaccompanied minor crosses the southern border.
Everything begins with Border Patrol,
which is the enforcement arm of Customs and Border Protection
and is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
First, unaccompanied children are apprehended
by Border Patrol agents
and immediately sent to a holding facility.
Then, within 72 hours, they're supposed to be
transferred to longer-term shelters
that are run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement,
which is housed in the Department
of Health and Human Services.
That's where unaccompanied minors stay while officials work
to reunite them with a sponsor who's already in the US,
usually a parent, family member, or family friend.
That brings us back to Trump's claim.
-And they're much better than they were under
President Obama, by far.
-See, it's important to understand
that he's referring to Border Patrol holding facilities,
where children are sent when they first cross the border
and poor conditions at those facilities are nothing new.
-When they become overcrowded or when children
have to be in them for longer periods of time,
many things are going to go wrong.
-Overcrowding and lengthy stays in CBP facilities
happened under President Obama in 2014
when an influx of unaccompanied migrant children
flooded the southern border.
-We now have an actual humanitarian crisis
on the border that only underscores the need
to drop the politics
and fix our immigration system, once and for all.
-The Obama administration faced criticism
for its initial response,
but corrected course by directing FEMA
to coordinate aid efforts,
opening up influx shelters and creating safeguards
to prevent this from happening in the future.
-Their policy was, in general,
to make sure that kids were staying in shelters
for as short a period of time as possible,
which is what child welfare experts
also think is the best policy.
What we saw the Trump administration do
is something quite different.
Last year, they took steps
to actually slow the release of children from shelters.
-If the Obama administration created a system
to address this type of crisis, how did things get so bad?
Border Patrol has apprehended
more than 69,000 unaccompanied children
since October of 2018 and HHS
said it's on track to care for the largest number
of unaccompanied minors in the program's history.
-Two weeks ago, I briefed the media
and testified in Congress that our immigration system
was at the breaking point.
That breaking point has arrived this week at our border.
-Government data released in May of 2019
revealed that hundreds of children
had been held in Border Patrol facilities
for longer than the law-mandated 72 hours.
In early June, federal officials announced plans
to open three emergency shelters
to house thousands of unaccompanied children.
By mid-June, immigration lawyers
visited a Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas,
and asked a federal judge to order immediate inspections,
claiming the conditions and lengths of stay violated US law.
-Over the last five years,
I have spent more than 1,000 hours
in immigration detention centers.
Never before have I seen such degrading
and inhumane conditions for children in detention,
as what I saw, heard, and smelled in Clint, Texas.
-Immigration and health officials moved
hundreds of migrant children out of Clint after these reports.
DHS reported the number of unaccompanied children
in Border Patrol custody
dropped from nearly 2,800 on June 7th
to less than 1,000 on June 25th.
-They made these policy changes
which really helped release a ton of children from shelters
and alleviate the backlog and so our question is,
"Well, does that mean that this was actually
really about a policy
or was it about something that they couldn't control"?
-Immigration lawyers point to some key differences
between the way the Trump administration
and previous administrations
have handled the influx of migrants.
-Over just the last year, there have been seven children
who have died in federal immigration custody
or just after being released
from federal immigration custody,
and this stands in contrast to nearly a decade
previously of no reported child deaths.
-The Trump administration said that overcrowding
at the CBP facilities
was due to lack of bed space in the shelters for children
run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
-We're full right now. We're full.
We do not have capacity for more of these unaccompanied children
who come across the border.
-But data suggests there's more to the story.
-The morning that my colleagues and I arrived at Clint,
a facility designed for just over 100 adults,
it was holding 351 children that morning.
At the same time, there were hundreds of available beds
in ORR custody,
where those children should have been transferred to.
-Immigration attorneys and former government officials
have said that Trump's immigration policies
have compounded the crisis.
-From the very highest levels of this administration,
people have been clear that they intend to deter asylum seekers
through any means necessary.
-In April of 2018, DHS and HHS
entered a memorandum of agreement
that required the departments to share information
about unaccompanied children and their potential sponsors.
Critics say this policy
decreased the number of sponsors coming forward
because they were afraid of arrest or deportation,
and fewer potential sponsors meant more children
spent longer periods of time in government custody,
further overwhelming the system.
-The whole system depends on children
who arrive at the shelters
saying who their parent or relative is
and then the parent or relative being willing to come forward
and say, "Yes, I can care for this child".
-A Washington Post investigation found that this policy
was implemented to intentionally deter migrant children
and their parents from crossing the border.
-It's clear that the highest levels of the Trump
administration were talking about a memorandum of agreement,
how it could be an effective deterrent against children
coming across the border,
but how it could also have the effect
of costing hundreds of millions of dollars
and creating a problem with bed capacity.
-Conditions at CBP facilities were bad in 2014, under Obama,
but Trump's claim that the situation
is "much better now" is wrong
and the administration's explanation
for why the crisis occurred in the first place
is misleading.