MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff Calls Out Biden for Blocking Media Access to Migrant Facilities: ‘It’s a Huge Mistake’
MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff called out President Joe Biden and his administration for restricting media access to the child migrant facilities at the United States border, slamming the move as a “huge mistake.”
The View’s Joy Behar first asked Soboroff, who has recently reported from Tijuana, Mexico and other boarder locations, what the difference is between Biden’s policies and actions and those of Donald Trump.
“We were all horrified when Trump started snatching kids from their parents at the border as part of his appalling ‘zero tolerance’ policy. Now we know Biden isn’t doing anything like that. They’re not separating kids, are they?” Behar asked on Monday’s The View, noting that reporters have claimed that conditions are still unfavorable while minors are still being held beyond the legal time period.
The host also showed photographs from a facility in Donna, Texas, adding that some reports have revealed that minors do not have access to beds or to showers.
“Those are horrific photos. Those are the circumstances I think all of us who follow this closely knew that the children were in. Part of the problem is the Biden administration isn’t letting us in to go see them for ourselves,” Soboroff responded, noting that while children are not being separated from their families and put in cages, “this is the same type of punitive, jail like facility operated by border patrol — agents are there as law enforcement.”
Soboroff went on to point out that officials at these facilities wear guns on their hips, adding that the types of facilities used by the Biden administration are essentially the same as those used by Trump.
“They say, Joy, they don’t want to hold kids in facilities like that anymore,” he added. “They say they want to depart from, as I mentioned, the 30 years of deterrence and punishment under Democrats and Republicans that — like that — allowed Donald Trump to separate children from their parents in a way nobody had ever done before, but they were not able to shut those places down fast enough.”
Shortly after, Sunny Hostin noted that the Biden administration claims that they are blocking media access from the facilities due to health concerns related to the coronavirus, adding, “but aren’t there measures that could be taken to mitigate that while still allowing for transparency?”
“I think it’s a huge mistake, Sunny,” he said. “It’s a mistake because it will help their case explaining what they want to move away from, sort of what the hand is that they have been dealt, and how to get away from this style of treating asylum-seeking children and refugees as criminals, and not as people who are coming here to — like I said, seek asylum and seek refuge.”
Soboroff continued to label the Biden administration’s lack of transparency as “very problematic,” adding, in terms of Covid, I don’t think it’s a good excuse.”
“I went in inside during the pandemic, Men’s Central Jail, here in Los Angeles, the world’s largest jail system as Covid was ravaging this city,” he continued. You wear a mask. You wear PPE. I mean, if senators can go in there with the Secretary of Homeland Security, why can’t journalists, particularly some have pointed out on social media, local journalists who are there on the ground and know these communities to document what’s happening. To tell the story of where the Biden administration wants to go, and how they want to be different than the Trump administration and other administrations before that.”
Watch above, via ABC.
