This week, a delegation of about a dozen Democratic leaders toured border facilities. What they found was heartbreaking: people without access to the medicine they need, crowded rooms, and unclean spaces. After the visit, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about the inhumane conditions. And despite the fact that her account was corroborated by some of the other politicians that attended – including Judy Chu, Rashida Tlaib, and Joe Kennedy III – and that Joaquin Castro provided photographic proof, conservatives are determined to disprove her.
Fox News interview recently spoke to Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who was “full of indignation” at the reports coming from the politicians. According to Rodriguez, who is the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, he didn’t see anything worth of outrage.
“To my surprise, I saw something drastically different from the stories I’ve been hearing in our national discourse,” he said. “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.”
When he asked the agents whether they had staged the facility, they said they hadn’t. “They unequivocally denied it – we were witnessing the identical conditions the attorneys saw when they toured the facility days earlier.”
And while Fox News is using this story to counter AOC’s claims, Rodriguez’s claims are incomplete. He relied on information from the agents themselves instead of talking to any of the actual people affected – aka the same folks who told members of Congress that they weren’t allowed to shower for more than two weeks or had to drink water from a toilet.
Furthermore, investigators for the Department of Homeland Security who visited border station in May found immigrants living in standing room-only cells, where they cannot lie down, that the facility was overcrowded, that people slept on the floor, and that many had no access to showers. “Most single adults had not had a shower in CBP custody despite several being held for as long as a month,” the report read, according to NBC News.