PHILADELPHIA — Rep. Ilhan Omar said the migrant children being held in detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border are treated worse than animals.
The Minnesota Democrat said it is “human” for immigrants coming to the country illegally to find another way to cross the border if they are turned away at a port of entry because their survival depends on it.
“These people are faced with cruel decisions, inhumane decisions on what they should do to make their children’s lives better and what they should do to make their own lives better,” she said Saturday at Netroots Nation, an annual conference touting progressive priorities.
“One of our members said to me, if there were dogs in those cages, every single member of Congress would vote to make sure that all of these cages didn’t exist any longer. We live in a society and govern in a body that might value the life of a dog more than they value the life of a child who might not look like theirs,” she said.
Reports of overcrowding at detention facilities and the deaths of at least six migrant children in federal custody have brought intense scrutiny to the conditions of the facilities.
A day earlier, Vice President Mike Pence toured a Border Patrol facility in Texas where the media was shown hundreds of men in cages who did not have room to lie down. “This is tough stuff,” Pence said Friday at a press conference after his visit in McAllen, Texas. “That’s the overcrowding President Trump has been talking about. That’s the overwhelming of the system that some in Congress have said was a manufactured crisis.”
“But now I think the American people can see this crisis is real,” he added.
