Is Joe Biden trying to curb bad press? Reporters banned from touring child detention facilities amid Covid-19
Multiple reports suggest that the Biden administration will ban reporters from taking a tour of juvenile detention facilities that are now accommodating unaccompanied minors who came across the United States-Mexico border looking for asylum. Confirming this, a spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families (ACF) said, "Reporters will not be allowed inside the Carrizo Springs facility for unaccompanied minors that was recently opened under the Biden administration in Texas."
Talking to The Daily Caller, the spokesperson also added, “The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is not hosting media tours of unaccompanied children (UC) facilities currently due to the Covid-19 pandemic. If media tours resume, we will send a media advisory,” the spokesperson added.
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Is this a move to curb bad publicity?
The Gateway Pundit reported these detention facilities were often shown as "cages" that imprisoned children and added that images shared were actually dated during the time Barack Obama was president. It also shed light on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas's statement of "looking into" an ABC reporter's claims and that the new administration is "open" to have the media reporting on the facilities, leading to speculate if the Biden administration was looking to ward off the bad press.
“I’m happy to take a look at that, I owe it to my people to understand the situation and the reasons why access was denied,” Mayorkas said coming to the defense of Biden's move which has already drawn some flak. “Let me share with you what I communicate to the workforce and we’ll leave it at that because it’s in the service of openness and transparency. Don’t shrink from criticism, just work very hard not to deserve it.”
With Biden relaxing the restrictions on the US-Mexico borders, asylum seekers came in huge numbers which the TGP's report says, "The immigrants hoped to take advantage of the Democrat Party’s more lenient immigration policies." Mayorkas said the situation or reactivating these facilities would be a challenge.
"I learned that we did not have the facilities available or equipped to administer the humanitarian laws that our Congress passed years ago," Mayorkas said in his first appearance at a White House briefing, according to ABC. "We did not have the personnel, policies, procedures, or training to administer those laws. Quite frankly, the entire system was gutted."
“We are challenged at the border,” Mayorkas said in the briefing Monday. “It is a stressful challenge.”
Previously, we reported that Biden's decision to start processing the asylum seekers subject to the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) aka 'Remain in Mexico' program suggested that he was treating the issue in a more compassionate manner, but there was unrest coming in from some of the immigrant advocates who said he wasn't acting quick enough to reverse his predecessor's policies despite having signed a lot of executive orders on immigration already.
