Pence says ‘crisis is real’ after migrant centers tour

WASHINGTON – With television cameras in tow, Vice President Mike Pence toured a pair of border patrol facilities in Texas on Friday, encountering at one the foul odor of cages crowded with men.

On his first stop, at a processing center for migrants just outside McAllen, Texas, Pence said he “couldn’t be more impressed” by what he described as “the compassionate work” by Border Patrol agents.

“Every family that I spoke with told me they were being well cared for,” he said.

The other stop, at an outdoor portal at the McAllen Border Station, offered a different picture.

A reporter traveling with Pence described a horrendous stench in the facility and said that nearly 400 men were housed in sweltering cages so crowded it would have been impossible for all of them to lie down. Some of the detainees shouted to reporters that they had been held 40 days or longer and complained that they were hungry.

The trip to the Texas border by Pence and a group of Republican senators comes amid reports of dangerously overcrowded conditions at some facilities detaining migrants who cross the border illegally.

Slamming Democrats who have called the situation on the border “a manufactured crisis,” Pence said the U.S. has “a moral obligation” to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws that he said are exacerbating the problem.

He called for Democrats to fund more Immigration and Customs Enforcement beds and said he had pushed for more Department of Homeland Security spending because of the situation.

“The crisis is real,” he said.