McAllen, TX – An audio recording that appears to capture the heartbreaking voices of small Spanish-speaking children crying out for their parents at a U.S. immigration facility took center stage Monday in the growing uproar over the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents.
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“Papa! Papa!” one child is heard weeping in the audio file that was first reported by the nonprofit ProPublica and later provide to The Associated Press.
Human rights attorney Jennifer Harbury said she received the tape from a whistleblower and told ProPublica it was recorded in the last week. She did not provide details about where exactly it was recorded.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said she had not heard the audio but said children taken into custody by the government are being treated humanely. She said the government has high standards for detention centers and the children are well cared for, stressing that Congress needs to plug loopholes in the law so families can stay together.
The audio surfaced as politicians and advocates flocked to the U.S.-Mexico border to visit U.S. immigration detention centers and turn up the pressure on the Trump administration.
And the backlash over the policy widened. The Mormon church said it is “deeply troubled” by the separation of families at the border and urged national leaders to find compassionate solutions. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, reversed a decision to send a National Guard helicopter from his state to the Mexican border to assist in a deployment, citing the administration’s “cruel and inhumane” policy.
At the border, an estimated 80 people pleaded guilty Monday to immigration charges, including some who asked the judge questions such as “What’s going to happen to my daughter?” and “What will happen to my son?”
Attorneys at the hearings said the immigrants had brought two dozen boys and girls with them to the U.S., and the judge replied that he didn’t know what would happen to their children.
Several groups of lawmakers toured a nearby facility in Brownsville, Texas, that houses hundreds of immigrant children.
Democratic Rep. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico said the location was a former hospital converted into living quarters for children, with rooms divided by age group. There was even a small room for infants, complete with two high chairs, where two baby boys wore matching rugby style shirts with orange and white stripes.
Another group of lawmakers on Sunday visited an old warehouse in McAllen, Texas, where hundreds of children are being held in cages created by metal fencing. One cage held 20 youngsters.
More than 1,100 people were inside the large, dark facility, which is divided into separate wings for unaccompanied children, adults on their own, and mothers and fathers with children.
In Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for people trying to enter the U.S., Border Patrol officials say they must crack down on migrants and separate adults from children as a deterrent to others trying to get into the U.S. illegally.
“When you exempt a group of people from the law … that creates a draw,” said Manuel Padilla, the Border Patrol’s chief agent there.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, speaking to reporters during a tour of San Diego immigration detention facilities with Rep. Juan Vargas and other House Democrats, said family separation is a “heartbreaking, barbarian issue that could be changed in a moment by the president of the United States rescinding his action.”
“It so challenges the conscience of our country that it must be changed and must be changed immediately,” she said during a news conference at a San Diego terminal that is connected to the airport in Tijuana, Mexico by a bridge.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas announced late Monday that he was introducing emergency legislation intended to keep immigrant families together.
“All Americans are rightly horrified by the images we are seeing on the news, children in tears pulled away from their mothers and fathers,” Cruz said. “This must stop.”
President Donald Trump emphatically defended his administration’s policy Monday, again falsely blaming Democrats.
“The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” he declared. “Not on my watch.”
Mentally ill potus is blaming the Democrats .
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Hopefully he’ll get stuck in space with his newly announced program and Kim will laugh his head off.
The deplorable policy to separate 4 year olds from their families is music to the deaf ears of the lemmings who love the Angel of Deportation Toxic Trumpf. This policy is about the Orange Rasha, nothing else.
Being in a generation right after the holocaust – this is video is hard to hear. It tears at the heart and brings me to think of the separations at those times. We must find a way to keep the children with their parents.
Can u try to remember that these are illegals! They came here knowing that they are breaking the law. In other countries people get labor camp or execution for this. You can’t run a country like a free for all despite the views of the sick left who are so open minded their brains fell out! Many people come to this country legally. You don’t like the treatment come legally and do it right! Don’t break the laws and smuggle in people who don’t belong here add some children to the mix for pity and then cry wolf! Get over blaming everyone! Many pictures are still from the days of Obama but no body would report anything about the sacred man who could do no wrong, suddenly under trump there’s an uproar. You guys are so twisted, it’s so sad that you can’t stop to see the benefits in a country that has laws and actually sticks to them – gasp! Is it legal to stick to laws?!
Although I am an avid Trump supporter on this one he is WRONG. Very insensitive. Why separate families.
We as Jews who HV suffered this thru time and again should mk our voices heard and should speak out against this cruel policy
We HV an obligation. Our defeaning silence rings hypocritical. We are acting like our secular brethren did when we came knocking on America’s door
This should not happen
Maybe these children are crying because they were taken from their parents and abducted from the village they came from and want to go back home to their real parents and the adults with them are using these children as pawns to get into the country. Who is to prove these are the children of those adults and have not been abducted from their villages???
Anyone who cannot feel the pain of a child forcibly separated from their parents, or the pain of a parent separated from their child should have their yichus checked, as our Chazal say that the siman of a Yid is that we are reachamonim bnai rachamonim. If that makes me a snowflake then I stand proud to be a snowflake. I suggest all the goyim who wish to blame this on Hillary, the Democrats etc. please take your hateful comments to Foxnews, where the ahchzorim will welcome you with open arms
Which word of illegal don’t you understand?
Liberals make me sick comparing this to the holocaust.
They should be ashamed of themselves for trying to exploit everything.