“There was a toilet but no running water for people to drink,” Joaquin Castro said. “One of the women said she was told by an agent to drink water out of the toilet.”
Three members of Congress who visited Border Patrol facilities on Monday said immigrant women were being detained without running water and told by agents to drink from the toilets.
Lawmakers, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, toured the facilities in El Paso and Clint, Texas, as part of a delegation to investigate detention centers used to hold immigrants, following reports children and adults were being housed in squalid conditions. Recent reports from the Clint facility drew outrage last week after lawyers who visited spoke out and described children caring for infants and toddlers, no access to soap and toothbrushes, and inadequate food, water, and sanitation.
Ocasio-Cortez said one of the women she spoke to described the treatment by border authorities — being woken up at odd hours and calling them whores — as “psychological warfare.”
“This has been horrifying so far,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweet. “We’re talking systemic cruelty [with] a dehumanizing culture that treats them like animals.”
Rep. Joaquin Castro said that at Border Patrol Station 1 near El Paso a group of 15 to 20 mothers were held in a cell that had a toilet with no running water.
“There was a toilet but no running water for people to drink,” Castro said. “One of the women said she was told by an agent to drink water out of the toilet.”
