Republican Congressman Steve King appeared on CNN this morning to discuss his recent trip to the U.S./Mexico border.
“We traveled all the way from the mouth of the Rio Grande River there at the Gulf of Mexico on up to Laredo, stopped in at multiple locations in Brownsville and McAllen and on up to Laredo,” King said, “as close as we could get to the border all the way.”
King, a guest on CNN’s “New Day” morning show, said in visits with local residents, federal officials and the staff working at detention centers in Texas, he learned things that “shocked me deeply” about the children who’ve walked across the border.
“Of the unaccompanied alien children, 57,000 of them…as of June 15, well of 60,000 or 70,000 by now…a very high percentage of girls are given birth control pills before they send them on the journey up the ‘train of death’ up the beast to get to the river and then to pay a coyote to give them a ride across because the families expect the girl to be raped on the way,” King said.
King said he was told up to 70 percent of the female children had been sexually assaulted. King said it “sickens me” to learn that, but King said once those children reach American soil, they’re being treated “humanely” by federal agents and the private groups that have stepped forward to help house them.
“I have to say that everybody that is treating and serving people down there is going everything they can with the resources they have and the resources they can garner,” King said. “…That’s the American compassion.”
King faulted Joe Morton, director of the U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, for helping open the flood gates for this wave of Central American children because of the wording in a memo about DACA, which stands for “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.”
“I think we should fix it,” King said on CNN. “I think we should first articulate this clearly: this is a man-caused disaster and the man that caused it is Barack Obama with his DACA policy, with his Morton memos and the advertisement that has been a huge magnet that has caused these families to give their daughters birth control and send them down a rape path all the way through Mexico.”
King said he would vote to change the 2008 law President George W. Bush signed which forbids immediate deportation of children from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador who travel through Mexico and cross into the United States.