Fox & Friends Plays Down Conditions for Migrant Children in Holding Facilities: It’s ‘Not the Hyatt’

Fox & Friends Plays Down Conditions for Migrant Children in Holding Facilities: It’s ‘Not the Hyatt’

Brian Kilmeade doesn’t know much, but he knows this: migrant children caught crossing the southern border should never have expected to be held in a Hyatt.

Presumably the children could at least have expected they would not be held in what at least one doctor described as “torture conditions,” but what are you going to do.

Kilmeade made the comment during a Tuesday morning interview with Mark Morgan, the acting head of ICE. Morgan had just admitted that “there is some truth” to the allegations that children are being held in unsanitary conditions but insisted that it is Congress’ fault for not providing funding for better facilities:

“The Border Patrol stations, they were desgined for adults, only for a few hours and be removed. They are overcrowded, they’ve got hundreds of children in there, we don’t want ’em in those conditions either. We want to get ’em out of there, but we need funding so HHS can get the adequate bed space.”

So much buck-passing!

Anyway, that was when Kilmeade made his brilliant observation:

“But Mark, you’re never going to have a Hyatt at the border. It’s never going to be great. That’s never the intention.”

A Hyatt, no. But basic sanitary conditions, access to doctors, diapers and other necessities would be good. Failing to provide even that level of care is a human-rights violation.

Yet the Trump administration has been in court arguing that it does not have to provide items like toothbrushes and soap to these kids. If Kilmeade doesn’t think the migrants deserve a Hyatt, perhaps he’d agree that the government should bring conditions up to the standards of at least a low-rent Red Roof Inn.

As it happens, the Texas Tribune reports that local communities around the Border Patrol facilities where children are being forced to sleep on cement floors with the lights on 24 hours a day have tried to donate necessities for them. But they have been turned away and told that the Border Patrol doesn’t take donations.

Maybe there is a problem with getting funding from Congress, but it does not seem as if the relevant agencies are in any sort of a hurry to alleviate conditions in these facilities. Helping the kids they are holding does not seem to be, despite Morgan’s protestations, the point.

Watch the segment above, via Fox News.

Gary Legum

Gary Legum has written about politics and culture for Independent Journal Review, Salon, The Daily Beast, Wonkette, AlterNet and McSweeney's, among others. He currently lives in his native state of Virginia.

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