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Vice President Mike Pence has witnessed the extreme overcrowding of migrants in federal detention centers when he went to Texas twice on Friday.
The agents wore face masks and the video showed detainees crammed into their holding areas surrounded by a wire fence, concrete floor littered with silver thermal blankets. The reporters who accompanied Pence described the installation as a "horrible" smell.
A group of men held behind chain links shouted at the news cameras: "No shower, no shower!"
Pence later stated that what he had seen was evidence of an "overwhelmed system".
The experience does not seem to have tempered a statement made earlier in the day that reports of ill-treatment, deplorable conditions and lack of basic necessities were "defamatory".
The Deputy Speaker, with Senator Lindsey Graham. R-S.C.. And Homeland Security officials repeated the words "the crisis is real" by referring to illegal crossing of the border and legal asylum requests at the border.
"But what is not real," he said, "are the slanderous allegations of heartless ill-treatment by the Customs and Border Protection Service.
The remarks were made during a round table after Pence's visit to a temporary detention center located near the Donna-Rio Bravo International Bridge in Texas.
At the Donna, Texas facility, which had a capacity of 1,000 people, most of the detainees were lying on mats on the floor. The place welcomed about 800 migrants.
"I am most impressed by the compassionate work that our Customs and Border Protection Department is doing here at this border facility," said Mr. Pence.
He stated that President Donald Trump had sent him so that "the American people could see what was happening here". A journalist on the tour was not allowed to talk to detained children or adults.
"It's time for us to move beyond the rhetoric of the American left," Pence said at a roundtable in McAllen.
He refuted the description, used by US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other critics of Trump, of places of detention as "concentration camps".
At Donna Detention Center, he sought to discredit reports and photographs of poor prison conditions in federal migration centers, including children sleeping on concrete benches or living without soap or toothpaste.
"Every family I talked to told me that we care about them," he said.
Pence substantiated his claim by asking a group of migrants from Donna's center, probably Spanish speakers, "they took good care of you here." Most have acquiesced.
Hope Frye, an immigration lawyer in San Francisco who said she visited all federal facilities for migrants in the Rio Grande Valley, was adamant that the conditions were deplorable.
"The idea that this is false or exaggerated is really shocking," she said. "It's like saying that the voices of migrants are false, all of which gives the same picture: a depraved indifference to the safety and well-being of the children who come to us and are entrusted to our care."
In May, the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security drafted an internal report stating that conditions were so bad in a border center in El Paso, Texas, where about half of the migrants in detention slept outside, that the agents feared possible riots.
Pence acknowledged that there was overcrowding in some detention centers, but added that it was simply additional evidence that the government was facing a real crisis at the time. border.
At the roundtable, Homeland Security and US Border Patrol officials told stories of "recycled" children being used by migrants to try to enter the United States, false claims of Asylum and sick migrant children rescued and treated.
Rodolfo Karisch, chief officer of the US Border Patrol for the Rio Grande Valley area, said more than 30 migrants a day were being sent to hospitals for injuries, conditions and ailments.
The Republican Graham of South Carolina has called the agents of the US border patrol "every moment" the patriot that are the American soldiers who fight abroad. "I do not know what we're paying you," he says, "but it's not enough."
Like Pence, it has created overcrowded conditions in detention centers, filled in part by families fleeing poverty and gang-related violence in Central America, at the feet of congressional Democrats.
"The problem we have here can be solved, literally overnight," Graham said.
He sought support for his own legislation to compel asylum seekers to apply for US safe haven at home, expel unaccompanied minors immediately and increase the length of detention of migrant children.
Sally Bronston contributed.
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