Kansas Rep. Roger Marshall says migrant detention is ‘adequate.’ What’s his idea of awful?

Good news, people! As it turns out, all is well inside those federal cages for detained migrants.

Some of the same facilities that the Department of Homeland Security’s Acting Inspector General Jennifer Costello called dangerously overcrowded, Kansas Republican Rep. Roger Marshall calls “adequate with lots of room for improvement.”

Conditions that a pediatrician who examined migrant children in detention in McAllen said could be compared to those in “torture facilities” convinced the obstetrician from Great Bend, Kansas, that at least “we’re trying.”

What the congressional Democrats who visited facilities in El Paso saw made them cry out. (Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, who posted videos of his visit, reported that “one of the women said she was told by an agent to drink water out of a toilet.”)

What Marshall said after tours in McAllen was that hey, “they have showers.”

What the photos we’ve seen with our own eyes show to be just plain wrong, the likely 2020 U.S. Senate candidate disregards and then somehow declares himself pleased with the job we’re doing.

Given the choice, you’re not going to believe the photos, are you?

One person’s cage for kids is another’s playpen, right? And those forced by overcrowding to stand are being spared the ill effects of sitting.

If the glass is half full, we’d like to know what was in it.

Roger Marshall’s upbeat account

But unless Marshall, who traveled to Texas as a member of the GOP “Doc Caucus,” was blindfolded or taken on a highly sanitized tour — and would they really do that for the Republicans but not the Democrats? — his upbeat account of a processing center, tent city and warehouse where asylum seekers are being held strikes us as unbelievable, literally.

And if he can’t see this situation as the moral cataclysm that it is, what else does Marshall not care to notice?

The housing he saw was in one case “adequate with lots of room for improvement and the other one was good. They have showers, put them all through medical assessment,” Marshall said. “We’re trying. Is there room for improvement? Yes.”

That’s not to say Marshall wasn’t critical. Because he was — of the Democratic colleagues who saw what he did not.

He came away more convinced than ever that we really need that big, beautiful border wall. “It’s ironic that Democrats’ theatrics and screaming at Border Patrol agents comes after their refusal to properly fund the border the last 2 1/2 years. And remember, just six months ago, the Democrats dismissed this as a ‘manufactured crisis.’ ’’

A real crisis at the border

Migrants seeking asylum would not be stopped by a border wall because they are legally presenting claims for asylum at ports of entry. And the crisis is real, but has been manufactured in the sense that it’s been made exponentially worse by the Trump administration’s policies of zero tolerance, metering — intentionally creating backlogs at ports of entry — family separation and cuts to well-regarded, U.S.-run programs in Central America. It’s almost as if the president intended to run on immigration next year.

Remember when General John Kelly, as President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, argued that the point of family separation was to deter those fleeing violence from coming here? It could and would be a “tough deterrent,” he told NPR. We now know that Kelly serves on the board of a for-profit company that houses migrant children in Texas and in Florida. And if this is deterrence, we’d hate to see encouragement; the policy did not work as intended, though it was very efficient at blowing families apart.

What Marshall calls “loopholes in our asylum laws” aren’t loopholes at all. Our asylum laws allow refugees to seek refuge.

‘Doing their absolute best’

“Our Border Patrol and medical teams are doing their absolute best,” Marshall said, “under the situation this obstruction has handed them.” Was that really their absolute best on display in the secret Facebook group of almost 1,000 current and former agents who, according to screenshots obtained by ProPublica, enjoyed sharing jokes about migrant deaths and disgusting, doctored photos of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

All of this see-no-evil nonchalance toward the mistreatment of immigrants is especially galling given that the economy in Marshall’s western Kansas district would fall apart without immigrant labor in the meat-packing industry. One in seven of his constituents is Hispanic.

On this 4th of July, Congressman, celebrate our independence by showing some. Celebrate this country by remembering why those fleeing violence and persecution want to come here. Celebrate it by insisting that America live up to her ideals. To do that, of course, you’d have to start by acknowledging problems you ought to find too heartbreaking to ignore.

This story was originally published July 3, 2019 at 4:57 PM.