In an interview on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures , South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham weighed in on the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, Talking Points Memo reports.
Graham, who toured border detention centers with Vice President Mike Pence on Friday, suggested that he has no problem with migrants staying at the overcrowded detention facilities for an extended period of time.
“What I saw is a bunch of people who have been here before, broke the law before, and we’re not going to let them go,” he began.
“I don’t care if they have to stay in these facilities for 400 days, we’re not going to let those men go that I saw. It would be dangerous.”
“All of them broke our law,” Graham said of the detained migrants, despite — as Talking Points Memo notes — the fact that seeking asylum is legal. As the publication adds, Pence spoke to children during his visit — not grown men — and the children told him that they had walked for months to reach the United States.
Graham also suggested that the detention centers should not be described as “concentration camps,” adding that they are simply “overwhelmed” due to the number of migrants crossing the southern border.
President Trump has also defended himself against criticism aimed at his administration’s immigration policy, taking to Twitter to slam media publications reporting about what they claim are squalid conditions at the border.
“Friday’s tour showed vividly, to politicians and the media, how well run and clean the children’s detention centers are,” the commander-in-chief tweeted, proceeding to make a distinction between child detention centers, and the facilities in which adults — many of them “criminals,” according to the president — are detained.
The adult facilities, according to Trump, are also clean and well-run, although “overcrowded.”
How immigrant rights activists are preparing for nationwide raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement planned to begin this weekend that will target undocumented members of immigrant families in at least nine major cities. https://t.co/N4g7dCn6Wr
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) July 13, 2019
Some have taken issue with the conditions at the southern border, however. Progressive lawmakers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts have all slammed the Trump administration over its immigration policy, as well as their own party for accepting the funding of these efforts.
As The Inquisitr reported, Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib, who paid a trip to a number of detention centers, testified on Friday before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, sharing their experience with other members of Congress, and with the American public.
The two kept breaking down in tears while testifying, emotionally recounting meetings with migrants detained at the southern border.
‘I ask you—beg you—not to look away.’ — @RashidaTlaib gave a vivid and emotional account of what she saw at the migrant detention camps pic.twitter.com/5d6wxgMssR
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) July 14, 2019
The progressive wing’s opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration policy, coupled with their criticism of top Democrats, has further escalated their feud with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.