Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday skirted around CNN reporter Jake Tapper’s questions about the squalid conditions migrant child are living under at southern border detention facilities.
Last week, a Justice Department lawyer argued that the U.S. government wasn’t required to give soap and toothbrushes to the kids at the detention centers.
“This is the wealthiest nation in the world,” Tapper pointed out to Pence. “We have money to give toothpaste and soap and blankets to the kids in this facility in El Paso county, right now we do.”
The vice president responded, “Of course we do.”
“So why aren’t we?” Tapper asked.
That’s when Pence claimed that it up to Congress to allow more funding to deal with the conditions at the border, then he pivoted to human traffickers.
“My point is it’s all a part of the appropriations process,” Pence said. “Congress needs to provide additional support to deal with the crisis at our southern border but we’ve got to get to the root causes. We’ve got to close the loopholes that human traffickers, as we speak, are using to entice vulnerable families to take the long and dangerous journey north.”
Tapper read aloud a New Yorker article detailing a child detention center in Texas, where children were “filthy, sleeping on cold floors, and taking care of each other because of the lack of attention from guards.”
“I know you. You’re a father, you’re a man of faith,” Tapper said to Pence after he was done reading. “You can’t approve of that.”
“Well, no American, no American, should approve of this mass influx of people coming across our border,” Pence said. “It is overwhelming our system.”
Watch below:
Pence skirts around Tapper's questions about squalid conditions at child detention centers pic.twitter.com/9I9xJrtsqX
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) June 23, 2019
