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Vice President Mike Pence visited a border patrol facility in Texas after reports indicate that detained migrants are being held in dangerous conditions.
UNITED STATES TODAY & # 39; HUI

Vice President Mike Pence on Friday visited a Border Patrol unit in Texas as Republicans denied reports that migrants detained in such centers would be detained in deplorable and dangerous conditions.

Under a vinyl tent that also serves as a treatment center for migrants who cross the southern border illegally, Pence approached a woman who bounced a young boy on her lap and asked her where she was from.

"Salvador," she said through the intermediary of an interpreter.

"Are you and your children being cared for here?" Pence asked. "Do they treat you right here?" Do you have something to eat? "

The woman nodded yes.

Vice President Mike Pence (Photo: Matt Rourke / AP)

Pence's trip to the facility near McAllen, Texas, with a group of Republican senators, intervenes in the midst of reports from extremely overcrowded conditions in some places of detention. At least six migrant children in border facilities have died since December.

While Pence was visiting, the Democrats in the House, back in Washington, were hearing a high profile hearing about what they described as inhumane conditions they discovered during their visit to Washington. another detention center in Clint, Texas.

But Pence told reporters that he could "not be more impressed" by what he described as "the compassionate work" of Border Patrol officers in nearby McAllen.

"Every family I talked to told me that we took care of him," he said, pointing out that what he had heard was different from what he called "the rhetorical rhetoric" emanating from the Democrats.

It's not just democrats who have complained about conditions in detention centers at the border.

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Independent investigators from the US Department of Homeland Security visited border patrol facilities in western Texas in May and found that dozens of migrants were crammed into tight spaces that some of them were forced to to stay standing on a toilet.

After visiting five facilities in June, the Inspector General released a report describing dangerous overcrowding conditions.

More: Protesters prepare for Vice President Mike Pence's visit to Texas Detention Center

The facility that Pence visited on Friday is a treatment center and not one of those cited as chronically overcrowded. But this is also where the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security said that migrants receive substandard care.

The complex, a complex of air-conditioned tents, opened in early May at the border, about 20 km from McAllen and a few meters from an international bridge connecting the United States to Mexico. It is divided into four 8,000 square foot modules that resemble a high school gymnasium with a rocky linoleum floor. There is room for requests and toilets with showers and laundry facilities.

About 800 people gathered Friday in the premises, which, according to the authorities, would have a capacity of 1,000 people.

A journalist traveling with Pence recounted seeing inmates lying on the floor, lying on a nap of a kindergarten, covered with a thin foil blanket. In one room, the host facility, a crowd of more than 100 people sat on benches. Most of them looked dirty and officials said they were waiting for showers and that they had been taken away earlier on Friday. Some of the children were crying and sleeping.

Pence and second lady Karen Pence approached two boys sitting on a bench.

"I am the vice president," he said. "Do they take good care of you here? Do you have enough to eat? "

The boys have acquiesced.

Testimony touching: "They tore a piece of my heart": a migrant mother describes the illness of a toddler, her death

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A girl described her treatment while she was locked up at a border crossing in Texas, where hundreds of other migrant children were arrested this year. (1st of July)
AP, AP

"What we saw today is a facility that provides care that every American would be proud of," Pence said at a roundtable with patrol leaders Borders and Republicans on the Judiciary Committee of the Senate.

The slamming Democrats who described the border situation as a "manufactured crisis," Pence said, the United States has "a moral obligation" to revise the country's immigration laws.

"The facts are, we have a crisis at our southern border that is provoked by human traffickers who exploit the American legal loopholes to incite vulnerable families to make the long and dangerous journey to the north", a- he declared.

"The crisis is real," he said. "This is not a manufactured crisis."

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