00:00Well, Federica, thanks for having me. And I'll tell you, I woke up to that Miami Herald, Tampa Bay Times report this morning, and my jaw dropped because when we were touring, and by the way, this was a prearranged tour rather than an unannounced one, which members of Congress are entitled to under statute that I passed into law in the first Trump administration.
00:21But when we were touring and we were asking about the status of the detainees that were there, we were told that every single one of them, and he said there were 900, and the camp is currently built for 1,000, were in the finished stages of their immigration process and criminal convictions and were preparing and were in final stages of deportation within the next two weeks.
00:49Well, we were very suspect of that because they have a bracelet system of red, yellow, and green, I believe. And, you know, there were, we could hardly get up close to any of them, but it was clear that there were not many with red bracelets.
01:06But then the Herald story comes out this morning and shows that hundreds of these 900 detainees have no criminal conviction. And that was our suspicion to begin with.
01:16The detainees that are the detainees that are there now, and this is not a prison, this is an immigration detention center, were packed into cages like sardines, eight cages per tent, 32 to a cage, as you heard the reporter say, three very small toilets with sinks attached to the top of them, so that you are literally defecating and urinating where you brush, in the same unit that you brush your teeth,
01:44and that's where their drinking water, and that's where their drinking water is. The temperature, I brought a thermometer, was just at the threshold of the so-called air-conditioned tent, was 83 degrees.
01:56You go inside, you go inside, they didn't let us. If you would go further inside with those hundreds of bodies next to each other, then for sure it was much hotter than that.
02:08Red was an individual that had been, had a higher level criminal offense that they were convicted of. Green was a medium offense, and yellow, which most of them appeared to be yellow, were minor to civil offenses.
02:25And the Herald story made it very clear for the hundreds of cases that, hundreds of names that they reviewed, that most of those were not even stopped for any, detained for any criminal offense.
02:39I mean, we're talking about civil infractions, you know, a traffic stop. And these were also people who were transferred, already being detained, and were moved to this, essentially, internment camp, where the cruelty seems to be the point.
02:54I toured with an unannounced visit about six weeks ago, the Crome Detention Center, and they had a temporary tent facility there that did not have any of the detainees in cages, yet they told me the reason that they had to have them in cages at this camp was because it was temporary.
03:10Well, they don't have, well, they don't have the same standards for this facility as they do for the ones that are in permanent sites, but yet temporary structures. And that's because the cruelty is the point.
03:22I came out of that detention camp and described exactly what I saw. I brought a thermostat in and measured the temperature, sweltering heat. We saw bugs, grasshoppers, the largest that I've ever seen, hopping along through the encampment.
03:38The encampment. We were not allowed to see the medical clinic. We were not allowed to see an actual, we weren't allowed to go in where the detainees were in the cages, just view outside the threshold, but we couldn't go see the actual toilets.
03:53We saw one that was in a tent under construction, but I'm telling you plainly exactly what I saw.
04:00I've had Tom Homan testify in front of committees that he is someone who is bound and determined to deport as many human beings as possible, no matter whether they were just coming here to make a better way of life for themselves.
04:15And by the way, Federica, this facility was built with $450 million, twice the amount that detainees are usually detained for of state funds.
04:25No clue whether we're going to get any of that back in the state of Florida. And that's all while they have under the big ugly law, cut 17 million people off of their health care, made the largest cuts to nutrition assistance in history.
04:42But we can spend $450 million detaining people who apparently committed no other crime for the most part, except trying to make a better life for themselves here.
04:52They're not telling the truth. And it's an outrage.
04:55Well, when we had, if you remember back in the first term for President Trump, you had the Homestead Detention Center that had unaccompanied minors.
05:03And we were able to inspect that eventually when we changed the law that I that I sponsored unannounced.
05:10And we continued and protesters continued to demonstrate and oppose the inhumane conditions there.
05:18We will get in because this is a facility being managed through the ICE policies and members of Congress are going to get in for an unannounced visit.
05:26And we will we will not stop until we make sure that, look, that that people are treated humanely, that they are not being treated humanely in this facility.
05:36And at the end of the day, if you're a criminal and you've been convicted through due process in this country and you're an undocumented immigrant, you should be deported.
05:44But if you are someone like who had TPS revoked or humanitarian parole revoked and you followed our laws and the process and you're and you're facing deportation now, that's that's outrageous.
05:56And we need to make sure that we are prioritizing the worst of the worst.
06:00Donald Trump and his cronies are not telling the truth.
06:03And our Republican colleagues are just going along with it because they care more about supporting the MAGA movements than they do about taking care of the human beings and that that constituents that we represent and their families.
