An audio recording that appears to capture the heartbreaking voices of small Spanish-speaking children crying out for their parents at a US immigration facility on Monday took center stage in the growing uproar over the police of US President Donald Trump’s administration of separating immigrant children from their parents.
“Papa! Papa!” one child is heard weeping in the audio file that was first reported by the nonprofit ProPublica and later provided to reporters.
Human rights attorney Jennifer Harbury said she received the tape from a whistleblower and told ProPublica it was recorded in the last week.
Photo: AFP / US Customs and Border Protection
She did not provide details about where exactly it was recorded.
US 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 the US Congress needs to plug loopholes in the law so families can stay together.
The audio surfaced as politicians and advocates flocked to the US-Mexico border to visit US immigration detention centers and turn up the pressure on the Trump administration as the backlash over the policy widened.
Massachusetts Governor 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 on Monday pleaded guilty 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 US, and the judge replied that he did not know what would happen to their children.
Several groups of lawmakers toured a nearby facility in Brownsville, Texas, that houses hundreds of immigrant children.
US Representative Ben Ray Lujan, a Democrat from 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.
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.
US Customs and Border Protection later released video and photos of the McAllen location, that showed children sprawled atop mattresses laid on a concrete floor inside the enclosures, with little around them except flimsy space blankets.
In Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for people trying to enter the US, Border Patrol officials said they must crack down on migrants and separate adults from children as a deterrent to others trying to get into the US 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.
US House of Representatives Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, speaking to reporters during a tour of immigration detention facilities in San Diego, California, with Representative 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 told a news conference.
US Senator Ted Cruz late on Monday said that he would introduce 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.”
Trump emphatically defended his administration’s policy on Monday, again falsely blaming Democrats.
“The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” he said. “Not on my watch.”
Trump was scheduled to meet with Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill last night ahead of votes on immigration legislation tomorrow.
They were expected to discuss two bills scheduled, both drafted with no input from Democrats.
One bill would limit, but not fully prohibit family separations, fund Trump’s wall and give legal protections to young immigrants, known as “Dreamers,” who were brought to the country illegally as children.
Details were still in flux.
The bill faces strong headwinds as it is opposed by Democrats, who object to another provision that would cut legal immigration levels, and conservative Republicans who are backing a rival bill that takes a harder line on immigration.
Additional reporting by agencies
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