Senator Mike Braun, R-Ind., Told Fox News that a Biden official asked Republican senators to delete the photos they took at a border facility they were visiting on Friday.
Braun originally made the observations to the Washington Examiner.
“There was one of Biden’s representatives. I felt sorry for the lady because she really told me about deleting a photo, but when she found me, all the other pictures were taken, and that shows the hypocrisy,” Braun told Examiner of a health center. processing and retaining migrants in Donna, Texas.
Images of migrant children taken on Friday, March 26, 2021, at the Donna US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facility in Texas. Senator Mike Braun took the photos while visiting the facility with other Republican senators.
(Sen. Mike Braun)
“None of us would have gone down there if we had been gagged,” said Braun, adding that the Border Patrol also asked that no pictures be taken, but that “they were telling us this because they had to.”
Braun and 18 of his Republican colleagues, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, inspected the detention center this week, which is at 700 percent capacity amid an increase in the number of migrants.
SEN. BRAUN LETTER THINKS URGANDO BIDEN TO VISIT THE BORDER
The photos showed children sleeping on the floor in an enclosed area.
Braun told Examiner as the group stopped with border agents on the edge of Rio Grande, where migrants often try to cross illegally. There he said that a group of “coyotes”, who guide migrants across the border in search of money, scoffed at the group in Spanish.
“Suddenly, I heard insults from smugglers and coyotes across the river, mostly in Spanish, telling border guards that, whatever they do, we will go,” said Braun. “That kind of thing hits home in an anecdotal way because it’s a story that is kind of a metaphor for what’s going on across the border.”
GOP SENATORS FIND TRAFFICKING, MEMBERS OF THE CARTEL ON THE BORDER DURING THE TOUR IN RIO GRANDE AT NIGHT
Images of migrant children taken on Friday, March 26, 2021, at the Donna US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facility in Texas. Senator Mike Braun, R-Ind., Took the photos while visiting the facility with other Republican senators.
(Sen. Mike Braun)
Braun, after visiting the facility, wrote a letter to the president begging him to visit the border.
The letter, obtained first by Fox News, includes photos that Braun took on Friday during his visit to a US Customs and Border Protection facility in Texas.
The images show migrants huddled in capsules at the processing facility and children sleeping on mattresses on the floor.
“The crisis surrounding this wave makes it a moral imperative for you to see firsthand what is happening – not the clean version of the border tour by some of my colleagues in Congress,” wrote Braun. “Having gone personally this week, I can testify that this is an inhumane, unsustainable and dangerous situation.
As of Thursday, there were more than 18,000 unaccompanied minors in the custody of Border Protection or Health and Human Services on Thursday, according to internal security records.
By law, children must not remain in the processing facility for more than 72 hours before being transferred to HHS shelters specifically designed to care for children. But the increase in migrants at the border has overburdened processing centers and caused delays.
“I know why President Biden doesn’t want the media to be here – because we have an open border,” said Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, on Friday after visiting the facility.
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“If you were an unaccompanied minor, you would be sent to Donna’s facility, which we examined and visited. This facility was designed for 80 people in a pod, and they had 709 people … literally wall-to-wall in each of the small ones plexiglass cells that they have, and people flooding the hall, “said Lankford.